The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing from World War II, have been identified and will be returned to his family for burial with full military honors.
He is 2nd Lt. Arthur F. Eastman, U.S. Army Air Forces, of East Orange, N.J. He will be buried in September in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.
Representatives from the Army met with Eastmans next-of-kin to explain the recovery and identification process and to coordinate interment with military honors on behalf of the Secretary of the Army.
On Aug. 18, 1944, Eastman departed the airdrome at Finschhafen, New Guinea, on a test flight of his F-5E-2 aircraft, but never returned. Subsequent searches failed to locate Eastman or his aircraft.
In 2003, a Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) found documents in the Australian National Archives about an earlier site visit believed to be associated with an F-5E crash. According to the archives, an Australian official had visited the crash site in 1950 in Morobe province near Koilil Village, but there was no subsequent recovery.
In 2004, a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) investigated the crash site in the mountains of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. The team found aircraft wreckage and recommended the site be excavated.
In February-March 2007, a JPAC team excavated the crash site and recovered human remains, pilot-related items and other personal effects, including Eastmans military identification tag.
Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC also used dental comparisons in the identification of the remains.
For additional information on the Defense Departments mission to account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO Web site at http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo or call (703) 699-1169.
Welcome home, dear friend.
("F-5" was the designation used for recce versions of the late-model P-38.)
(Xinhuanet) -- Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz, the ex-wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is set to remarry in New York on Sunday with events organizer Richard Attias, a month after Sarkozy tied the knot with the model-turned-singer Carla Bruni, media reported Saturday. French Morning, a U. S. website for expatriates living in New York, said Cecilia, 50, is to wed the Morocco-born PR guru, at an unknown location followed by a reception at the Rockefeller Center in central Manhattan.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/24/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
So whadda ya get somebody as a gift going into their third one? Scratch tickets for the lottery?
Zimbabwe's main opposition party, the MDC, is warning of massive vote rigging during next Saturday's elections. Speaking at a party rally in the capital Harare, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said President Robert Mugabe will use any means to win the poll, including printing illegal ballots. But the opposition leader was confident that the MDC will win a landslide victory. President Mugabe voiced equal optimism during a speech held in the city of Bulawayo, an opposition stronghold. He vowed that Mr Tsvangirai will never become president, saying any vote for the opposition leader is a lost vote.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/24/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
vote fraud you say... who would've thunk
Posted by: Abu do you love ||
03/24/2008 16:31 Comments ||
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Mexico City - A shoot-out between suspected drug cartel gunmen and police in central Mexico has left at least six people dead. Masked men attacked a police station in the town of Jerécuaro and shot two officers and a secretary dead. They killed another two police officers when they made their getaway. One of the gunmen was killed in the attack. Police say they found hand grenades, weapons and cocaine in three vehicles abandoned by the gunmen. The attack may have been in revenge for recent police operations against drug cartels.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/24/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
The Mexican States of Sinaloa and Guanajuato are turning into Columbia.
(Xinhua) -- Investigators said Saturday that one of the two murdered Russian journalists was killed because of his work in journalism, Russia's RIA news agency reported.
Two television journalists from Russia's southern republic of Daghestan were murdered on Friday in two separate incidents. Ilyas Shurpayev, a journalist with Russia's state-run Channel One, was found stabbed to death in Moscow. Gadzhi Abashilov, head of Daghestan's state-run television station, was gunned down the same day in his car in Daghestan, a volatile province in the North Caucasus.
Investigators said that Abashilov's murder was possibly connected with his professional work. "The investigation is considering several versions. However, the main one is linked to Abashilov's professional activities," said Vladimir Markin, the official spokesman for the Investigation Committee under the Prosecutor-General's Office.
Shurpayev and Abashilov were on a list of names that reporters of a local paper were banned from mentioning, according to RIA reports. On the day before he was killed, Shurpayev mentioned on his Live Journal blog that local independent paper Nastoyashcheye Vremya had blacklisted him. Both of the murdered journalists had been put on the list, a former editor in chief of the paper confirmed. Nastoyashcheye Vremya, a daily featuring news and analysis, was launched in September last year. The paper is well known in Daghestan.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/24/2008 00:00 ||
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A Chinese-born engineer convicted of conspiracy to export U.S. defense technology to China was sentenced Monday to 24 1/2 years in federal prison by a judge who said the defendant betrayed his adopted country.
Chi Mak, 67, a naturalized U.S. citizen who worked on naval propulsion systems, was also convicted of acting as an unregistered foreign agent, attempting to violate export control laws and making false statements to the FBI.
Federal prosecutors asked for 30 years, while Mak's defense team proposed 10 years.
Mak asked U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney for leniency before sentencing. Four of Mak's relatives, including his wife, pleaded guilty last year to related offenses in exchange for leniency.
"I don't know so much about the law, but I feel I never intend to violate any law at all. I never intend to hurt my country. I love this country. I don't believe I hurt this country," Mak told the judge. "The truth is not like the one the prosecutor says. I still hope for justice."
The judge said Mak lied on immigration and government security clearance forms and perjured himself on the witness stand.
"I do believe a high-end sentence is appropriate here. Mr. Mak sadly, I believe, betrayed the United States. ... I really don't know how much damage he's done to us," Carney said.
"He's a very humble man, a very warm man and he wants to be helpful," the judge said, referencing letters of support from Mak's friends and former colleagues and friends. "But it's those traits and that persona that allowed him to pass information to the People's Republic of China."
Mak, who worked for Anaheim-based naval defense contractor Power Paragon, was arrested in late 2005 after FBI agents stopped his brother and sister-in-law as they boarded a flight to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China.
Investigators said they found three encrypted CDs in the couple's luggage that contained documents on a submarine propulsion system, a solid-state power switch for ships and a PowerPoint presentation on the future of power electronics.
During a monthlong trial last year, Mak's attorneys argued that the information he gathered was not classified and was often made public at industry conferences that were attended by engineers from all over the world, including China. They also argued that the information that Mak was accused of trying to pass to China was outdated and so far from being a functional technology that China could have done little with it.
Mak's attorney, Ronald Kaye, said he would file an appeal within 10 days. He accused prosecutors of being overly harsh with his client to make a point to the international espionage community and to China.
"We believe that history will prove the facts of this case differently," Kaye said outside court. "They essentially have sentenced him as if he's a trophy rather than a human being."
Mak, who has been in custody since his arrest, was allowed to hug his attorneys before being returned to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. Kaye asked that he be placed in a minimum security prison in Lompoc, Calif., and the court agreed to recommend that to federal prison officials.
Mak's wife, Rebecca Laiwah Chiu, pleaded guilty last year on the eve of her trial to one count of acting as a foreign agent without registering with the U.S. government. She is serving three years in federal prison and will be deported upon release.
His brother, Tai Mak, pleaded guilty last year to conspiring to violate export control laws in exchange for a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. Tai Mak's wife, Fuk Li, pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the violation of export control laws and received three years of probation.
Yui "Billy" Mak, the son of Tai Mak and Fuk Li, pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the violation of export control laws and was sentenced to time already served. The three will also be deported.
CHENGDU, China -- Heavily armed police have been patrolling in Chengdu (home to 10.5 million), the leafy, usually calm capital of Sichuan province, in a significant show of force and concern by the Chinese government about the spread of unrest from neighboring Tibet.
Ten days after Tibetan protests against Chinese rule turned violent in Lhasa, reverberations are being felt here, 1,250 miles away. Last week, Chinese authorities deployed troops to contain unrest that spread across mostly remote ethnic Tibetan villages in neighboring provinces, including Sichuan.
The Tibetan protests and the government crackdown threaten to embarrass China just months before the Summer Olympics are expected.
What it Means: Extensive troop deployments show how nervous Beijing is about this challenge to its rule.
Reporters have been unable to get in to verify conflicting accounts of violence and death tolls even as China's government has stepped up its attacks of some Western media for what it contends is as anti-China bias reporting the deaths.
Page 2
An attempt by a Wall Street Journal reporter to converse with a group of Tibetans who said they were from Ganzi, a heavily ethnic Tibetan region in the western part of Sichuan, abutting Tibet proper, was quickly interrupted by police Sunday. About a dozen men wearing helmets and holding their fingers on the triggers of machine guns surrounded the group and ordered the Tibetans aside while they checked the paperwork of the foreign reporter. Any photos showing monks or police were ordered erased.
Rumors of suicide bombings and stabbings in Chengdu by Tibetans against the majority Han Chinese bubbled across the streets and Internet forums.
#2
It still has enormous resources at its command. The energy crunch may have it off balance though. People in china aren't going to want to give up their new found luxuries and go back to riding bicycles and eating white rice once a day.
I hate to think of how ugly the regime would get on its way out.
#3
The unfortunate part of having a Sec. State named Rice is one could interpret that headline in the wrong way.
Posted by: ed ||
03/24/2008 13:38 Comments ||
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#4
A lot of the Chinese leadership is going to die or be dethroned because of losing face in the Olympic debacle. They are probably already wishing that they hadn't vied for it in the first place.
#5
Wishful thinking, y'all. The Chinese are treating the Tibetan situation with kid gloves. If they had wanted to stomp the rioters like a bug, they would have done so already.
The real issue here is the "us vs. them" mentality being perpetrated. Western media, as is their wont, has woefully misrepresented the situation on the ground in Xizang autonomous region (Tibet to the rest of you). The media has been wilfully complicit in several distortions and misrepresentations, and the Chinese have caught each and every single one of them. The Chinese message boards and blogs are afire with these calumnies. We're used to it, as a matter of fact, we expect our own press to lie, but to the Chinese raised on a diet of "the Western press shows it as it is", this comes as a rude shock, and an anti-Chinese shock.
#6
Woops, sorry, please check http://www.zonaeuropa.com/200803c.brief.htm#008 for screencaps of the Western media getting caught in their lies. This stuff is all over the Chinese internet.
#7
g: Western media, as is their wont, has woefully misrepresented the situation on the ground in Xizang autonomous region (Tibet to the rest of you). The media has been wilfully complicit in several distortions and misrepresentations, and the Chinese have caught each and every single one of them. The Chinese message boards and blogs are afire with these calumnies. We're used to it, as a matter of fact, we expect our own press to lie, but to the Chinese raised on a diet of "the Western press shows it as it is", this comes as a rude shock, and an anti-Chinese shock.
What do you perceive to be inaccurate? The fact that the Chinese are using live ammo on monks carrying out demonstrations? Or that Chinese troops are threatening to shoot reporters who speak to monks? Or that reporters are being expelled from Tibet? Or perhaps that the Tibetans don't see themselves as Chinese?
#8
g: Woops, sorry, please check http://www.zonaeuropa.com/200803c.brief.htm#008 for screencaps of the Western media getting caught in their lies. This stuff is all over the Chinese internet.
Zona Europa is run by a Chinese American Han supremacist who - for some reason - hasn't given up his American passport. The "lies" he points out could just be honest mistakes due to the difficulty in getting material given that Tibet's Han masters are keeping foreign journalists out of the area. Why are they doing this if they don't have anything to hide?
#9
More to the point, why are the Han threatening journalists with guns for interviewing Tibetans? Could it be that the Han habit of lying reflexively might be contradicted by Tibetan testimony? Could it be that the shiny, happy Tibetans of Han propaganda might not be lining up to kiss Han feet and strew flower petals in their path in gratitude for the Han confiscation of Tibetan lands?
#10
Zhang Fei, I have no idea what you're talking about. All I know is, his screencaps show obvious lies, the kind of which we are all too familiar with in the West. Photo cropping, selective quoting, viewing the situation through filters, and the like.
#12
g: Zhang Fei, I have no idea what you're talking about. All I know is, his screencaps show obvious lies, the kind of which we are all too familiar with in the West. Photo cropping, selective quoting, viewing the situation through filters, and the like.
I am saying is that they might be mistakes rather than lies. Lying has to do with representing something you know is factually incorrect to be true. A mistake is when you don't know it's factually incorrect.
Roland Soong (the website's Han supremacist author) goes on and on about how he's able to read Chinese and therefore see things that only readers of Chinese can access. But the fact that it's only accessible in Chinese doesn't mean it's accurate. Why aren't foreign journalists allowed to cover this event, if there aren't things that might contradict the lies of Tibet's Han conquerors? We know what captions are being attached to Xinhua's photos. The question is whether these captions are correct. It's not simply a question of a government narrative - it's also that only Han narratives are being spread around in Chinese.
#13
DV: I would believe the western press over this before I believe the Chinese controlled press.
It's not simply the question of a Chinese-controlled press - individual Chinese are parochial to a fault, and their narratives are colored by their bigotry. Think the Serb mentality about the Bosnian massacres - cubed.
#14
g: Wishful thinking, y'all. The Chinese are treating the Tibetan situation with kid gloves. If they had wanted to stomp the rioters like a bug, they would have done so already.
You're right - they could have killed hundreds of thousands of Tibetans, the way they did when they "liberated" Tibet from the Tibetans. The problem is that the backlash would have been severe, and might even have led to severe trade sanctions. I understand the Han are really feeling their oats, but China is still a pretty poor country, with porters (underemployed men) on many street corners. It still needs foreign markets so it can import foreign equipment and other things necessary for industrial development.
#15
Zhang Fei, your responses have become quite nonsensical. The plain fact is, the Western media have been caught red-handed in the act of baising news. This is something that they are famous for, and rightly so. There is no love lost for the Han Chinese (and frankly, I have no love for them, either - they screw me over on a daily basis). It is only the fact that bloggers exist who can catch them in their lies that makes this incident any different from hundreds of others. Think about Dan Rather and the memos that CBS unwisely released in their native formats.
#16
g: Zhang Fei, your responses have become quite nonsensical. The plain fact is, the Western media have been caught red-handed in the act of baising news. This is something that they are famous for, and rightly so. There is no love lost for the Han Chinese (and frankly, I have no love for them, either - they screw me over on a daily basis). It is only the fact that bloggers exist who can catch them in their lies that makes this incident any different from hundreds of others. Think about Dan Rather and the memos that CBS unwisely released in their native formats.
Actually, it is your claims that have become nonsensical. The bias against the Bush administration exists in an environment where journalists can come and go as they please, and ethnic bigotry isn't an issue. The situation in Tibet is one where no one really knows what's happening, because the Han have banned coverage by foreign journalists, and non-governmental Han narratives are colored by an overweening sense of racial/cultural superiority and entitlement to rule over Tibetan lands, not to mention censored by the Han government.
#17
Given the ban on foreign journalists, the only question here isn't whether the Han (government and civilians alike) are lying - it's what the extent of the lies are.
#18
OK man, I give up - you've definitely got a horse in this race. I don't. All I have to say is that the Western media (once again) got caught red-handed in a lie, a lie which reinforced their existing prejudices. Those of us who know the Western media will find nothing new in this report.
#19
g: OK man, I give up - you've definitely got a horse in this race. I don't. All I have to say is that the Western media (once again) got caught red-handed in a lie, a lie which reinforced their existing prejudices. Those of us who know the Western media will find nothing new in this report.
If you don't have a horse in this race, it's not apparent from your ceaseless covering for the Han rulers of Tibet. You can't even tell the difference between a lie and a mistake resulting from ignorance/confusion. This is compounded by your decision to ignore the fact that the Chinese are covering up what's happening in Tibet by not allowing foreign journalists to interview locals.
#20
I think I recently read that China has more a US$1,000 billion -- with a B -- stash from their trade surplus. That can keep the country going for a while, can't it?
Separately, while I would need solid proof that the Han Communist government is not lying as much as it thinks it can get away with, I would be shocked to learn that the corps of foreign correspondents are not, in this rare case, working from a narrative. It would be very helpful to have some satellite pictures for Old Patriot and other trained experts to interpret for us.
#21
TW: I think I recently read that China has more a US$1,000 billion -- with a B -- stash from their trade surplus. That can keep the country going for a while, can't it?
If you've got 100m unemployed, that's $10,000 per person. It's a good chunk of cash, but it won't shield China from the consequences of interrupted trade ties for very long. The export sector is the productive sector of the economy. A lot of the domestic sector is engaged in inflating the stock market and real estate bubbles.
#22
I don't know for sure, but I think a lot of that "surplus" isn't really there; I think over the years it's been used to subsidize the costs of the raw materials (both energy, metals, and plastics feedstocks) being used to keep the factories fed. But since it's done in the forms of loans that "in theory" will be paid back someday (but, rather like a lot of the mortgages here, probably won't) it doesn't get counted as subsidies.
#24
I have to side with Zhang on this. The Chicom government has ruthlessly exploited the strong Chinese chauvenism toward non-chinese untermenchen.
Chinese attitudes toward ethnic minorities make 19th century British attitudes toward black and brown colonials look positively progressive.
Remember, almost all of what the Chicoms say is for domestic consumption. And what they are saying reflects what most Chinese think - the Tibetans should be pathetically grateful for the benefits of Chinese culture and progress and those who aren't deserve to be shot. Anything else is a Western conspiracy.
#25
pb: Chinese attitudes toward ethnic minorities make 19th century British attitudes toward black and brown colonials look positively progressive.
Let me remind you that British attitudes did not merely "look" positively progressive. They were positively progressive. 19th century Chinese military practice was to massacre entire rebel cities after their surrender (typically after the safety of its inhabitants had been guaranteed during surrender negotiations). The massacre of tens of thousands of the Yunnanese nobility is a case in point. The massacre of Nanking at the close of the Taiping rebellion is another. And yes, both of these events happened in the 19th century.
#26
DV: Methinks the Communist government is a wee bit weaker and paranoid than is given credit for.
They're not weak. Weak is when they don't give orders to shoot because they're afraid the troops won't obey them, and might, instead, mutiny. Strong was when Lenin slaughtered his opponents. Weak was when the Politburo couldn't have Yeltsin killed. Forget all counter-intuitive Freudian* crap you've been told. The use of force is not a sign of weakness. The non-use of force is not a sign of strength.
* The idea that all of our psychological problems can be explained through Greek mythology is a laughable one, anyway.
#27
True, Zhang Fei. But force can have different manifestations, beside police apparatus or military might. For example the market forces may one day crush the Chinese communist government, if they stubbornly refuse to miror them in their institutions.
LONDON - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy will urge banks this week to make full and immediate disclosure of write-offs due to the global credit crisis, British officials said on Monday. The two leaders are increasingly concerned that confidence in financial markets is being hit by uncertainty over the scale of bad debts on banks books, which some estimates put as high as $600 billion, Browns office said.
Sarkozy is due to hold talks with Brown on Thursday during his two-day visit to Britain as guest of Queen Elizabeth. The two men will call for greater transparency in financial markets and, as a first step, full and immediate disclosure of the scale of write-offs by banks, Browns office said in a statement. Sarkozys visit is seen by British media as part of his drive for a close partnership with Brown.
Banks have written down over $125 billion of assets since November, hammering their shares. So far, action by central banks and governments has failed to halt the market turmoil.
The two leaders will call for more talks with the United States and other countries on measures to promote financial stability, in forums such as the Group of Seven industrialised countries, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Browns office said.
Brown, Sarkozy and the leaders of Germany and Italy met in London in January to discuss the financial crisis. The highest profile victim of the crisis in Britain has been mortgage lender Northern Rock, which Browns government was forced to nationalise.
Sarkozy and Brown will repeat calls for credit rating agencies to be more transparent and for international financial institutions to be reformed to provide early warning of financial risks to the global economy.
Posted by: Steve White ||
03/24/2008 00:32 ||
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#2
Yeah, Joe. After the Fed gets over dumping a couple trillion dollars into the system to protect the golden parachute mismanagers, everything will have a couple extra zeros attached to it.
Senator Arlen Specter, ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, called on the Justice Department to investigate the improper breach of confidential passport files of all three presidential candidates by contract employees at the U.S. State Department. ``That kind of a breach of privacy is just despicable,'' Specter, of Pennsylvania, said on CNN's ``Late Edition'' today. ``There are federal criminal statutes involved. I think that ought to be a very intense investigation.''
Posted by: Fred ||
03/24/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
lol! Funny photo.
Ok - so I admit, I'm curious. What did the look at Hillary Clinton's passport reveal?
In April 2005, Berger pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material from the National Archives in Washington. According to the lead prosecutor in the case Berger only took copies of classified information and that no original material was destroyed; however, there is notable controversy and speculation that he might have removed or destroyed originals of other unknown documents as well.
Berger currently serves as a foreign policy adviser to Senator Hillary Clinton in her presidential campaign.[2]
#3
The passport files that were accessed contain only data to apply for passport, i.e. name, DoB, SSAN, address, etc. Great for identify theft, no good to see where someone has traveled. That data would be over in Homeland Security now, dates and flights coming and going when you passed through Customs.
Posted by: Steve ||
03/24/2008 7:27 Comments ||
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#4
While Specter is a goofball, this is exactly something the Justice Department was set up to look at. I have seen calls for a congressional investigation, but congress needs to keep their dirty money grabbers out of it. Let the wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly on and they will find whether this was just idle and misplaced curiosity, or a full blown smear attempt.
TOKYO - The United States should use public funds to shore up its financial system and calm recent market turmoil, Japans financial services minister said in an interview published Monday.
Everybody's pretty easy about Uncle Sugar's money ...
It is essential (for the US) to understand that given Japans lesson, public fund injection (into the financial sector) is unavoidable, Yoshimi Watanabe told the Financial Times.
He said Japan was ready to share its experience with the United States at the Group of Seven meetings of finance ministers, who are due to gather in Washington next month. We are prepared to take coordinated action if necessary, he said. We must recognise that the current crisis is not as straightforward as past dollar crises.
The same newspaper reported over the weekend that US and European central banks were considering buying mortgage-backed securities to resolve the credit crisis triggered by a wave of US home loan defaults.
The problems have pushed the dollar down to a 12-year low against the yen and to the lowest-ever levels against the euro, causing concern in Japan and the eurozone about the impact on exports.
Japan suffered a deep and prolonged banking crisis in the 1990s after the countrys asset bubble burst, leading to the failure of a number of high-profile financial institutions. The Japanese government injected capital to the banking sector in an effort to shore up markets and struggling financial institutions, some of which were nationalised to prevent their collapse. The problems came amid Japans lost decade of stagnant growth and on-off recession in the 1990s, from which the country is still recovering.
Posted by: Steve White ||
03/24/2008 00:30 ||
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#1
TAIPEITIMES > JAPANESE MINISTER TELLS CHINA TO MAKE YUAN MORE FLEXIBLE.
#2
Oh yeah - advice from Japan. What a great idea. This is the country that turned a real estate bubble into a decade-long zero growth period. Government bonds paid zero percent for a long time, and people kept buying them.
#5
The Fed is already injecting $200 billion into the banking sector.
The US central bank said it was offering the money in a new Term Securities Lending Facility auction, which will allow a group of 20 large investment firms to borrow the money for a 28-day period.
Last week the Federal Reserve said it was making $200 billion available to US financial institutions in a bid to boost the struggling US financial system. "The Fed is now getting creative with solutions to the credit crunch," said Andrew Busch, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets. "The market can now provide to the Fed the stuff that they don't want ... [such as federal agency mortgage-backed securities] ... for the stuff they want [US Treasury securities]." Stephen Gallagher, an economist at Societe Generale, a French bank, said the move was aimed at helping banks stuck with mortgage securities that could not easily be traded.
Posted by: ed ||
03/24/2008 9:20 Comments ||
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#6
Uh, wait a minute. Not only has Japan experienced this same crisis and knows what NOT to do, they have a tremendous interest in US economy since they are the single largest investors in US Treasuries, followed by the Chinese. It is very much in their interest to make sure the US economy doesn't collapse since they are the primary creditors of our ongoing folly of living beyond our means on their credit. If they decide to quit buying Treasuries, the whole house of cards shuts down. At the last T-bill auction both the Japanese and Chinese did not buy. This is the single most scary thing that has occurred in the last 30 days as far as I'm concerned.
#7
Whatever. The Japanese pissed away god only knows how much yen - maybe a trillion or so? - "dropping cash from helicopters". It *didn't work*. It didn't work on a scale similar to the New Deal debacle. If this half-pint half-wit thinks it's such a keen idea, he can pillage his own fisc for the dosh.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
03/24/2008 10:35 Comments ||
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#8
"causing concern in Japan and the eurozone about the impact on exports"
That's what it's about -- they're worried about their share of a shrinking pie. Don't worry, Mr. Watanabe, my home is secure and I will probably buy another Toyota in a few years. But if you insist on raising my taxes to bail-out a bunch of idiot bankers who chose to ignore the basics of risk, then you can count on it being a much smaller Toyota with fewer options. Good luck.
I don't intend to be back here to argue this today, so let me put my two cents in here:
1. If you bought a bigger house than you really need, you made a common mistake.
2. If you bought a bigger house than you really could afford, you were dumb.
3. If you gave somebody a bigger mortgage than they could handle, you made a serious business error.
4. If you bought a package of these business errors, you are not a savvy investment banker -- you are an idiot who has been posing as one. You do not deserve to come through this unscathed.
#9
Darrell, all of that is true but one point. The banking geniuses who caused this bailed out months ago. They got their money, they left everyone holding the bag.
Posted by: Formerly Dan ||
03/24/2008 13:31 Comments ||
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#10
WE: At the last T-bill auction both the Japanese and Chinese did not buy. This is the single most scary thing that has occurred in the last 30 days as far as I'm concerned.
Not at all. The reason they did not buy is probably that Treasury rates are at all time lows, due to US investor fears about other kinds of debt. What we're finding out is that there is plenty of money to fund the national debt. And not enough money to fund the real estate bubble that has taken home prices into the stratosphere - from an affordability standpoint. Especially when mortgage security holders are getting 50 cents on the dollar upon foreclosure for the properties back the securities. When cockamamie lending policies are turfed, there will be plenty of interest in US debt securities from Americans and foreigners alike.
The problem is that these moronic lending policies are being perpetuated even as I write, which is why investors are staying away. Pension funds, mutual funds, endowments, et al are all watching and waiting for sanity to return. Just because you can sell toxic waste to someone doesn't mean you should make toxic waste - but that's what the banks were making and selling to investors for years, aided and abetted by the ratings agencies. After a while, they even began drinking their own Koolaid.
#11
The deficit is down, we aren't selling nearly as many Treasuries as we used to. I know I'm ignorant as a pig in mud about matters financial, but I'm not nearly as worried about this as I would have been a decade ago.
And I'd add much of the money came from Japanese and other Asian investors through so called carry trades. Asian investors are loosing their shirts through a double whammy of unsaleable debt and large currency loses.
The problem is even bigger in Australia and curiosly we don't even rate a page on wikipedia's list of property bubbles.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
(Xinhuanet) -- Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz, the ex-wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is set to remarry in New York on Sunday with events organizer Richard Attias, a month after Sarkozy tied the knot with the model-turned-singer Carla Bruni, media reported Saturday. French Morning, a U. S. website for expatriates living in New York, said Cecilia, 50, is to wed the Morocco-born PR guru, at an unknown location followed by a reception at the Rockefeller Center in central Manhattan.
Zimbabwe's main opposition party, the MDC, is warning of massive vote rigging during next Saturday's elections. Speaking at a party rally in the capital Harare, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said President Robert Mugabe will use any means to win the poll, including printing illegal ballots. But the opposition leader was confident that the MDC will win a landslide victory. President Mugabe voiced equal optimism during a speech held in the city of Bulawayo, an opposition stronghold. He vowed that Mr Tsvangirai will never become president, saying any vote for the opposition leader is a lost vote.
Mexico City - A shoot-out between suspected drug cartel gunmen and police in central Mexico has left at least six people dead. Masked men attacked a police station in the town of Jerécuaro and shot two officers and a secretary dead. They killed another two police officers when they made their getaway. One of the gunmen was killed in the attack. Police say they found hand grenades, weapons and cocaine in three vehicles abandoned by the gunmen. The attack may have been in revenge for recent police operations against drug cartels.
(Xinhua) -- Investigators said Saturday that one of the two murdered Russian journalists was killed because of his work in journalism, Russia's RIA news agency reported. 
In China, a Show of Force 
Senator Arlen Specter, ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, called on the Justice Department to investigate the improper breach of confidential passport files of all three presidential candidates by contract employees at the U.S. State Department. ``That kind of a breach of privacy is just despicable,'' Specter, of Pennsylvania, said on CNN's ``Late Edition'' today. ``There are federal criminal statutes involved. I think that ought to be a very intense investigation.''
TOKYO - The United States should use public funds to shore up its financial system and calm recent market turmoil, Japans financial services minister said in an interview published Monday.
