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Good Morning!
August, 2010. Photo credit: joanneleon
When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.
~Sophia Loren
News
Huge crowd gathers in New York City to protest Stop and Frisk
A shot of the silent march in full swing via @newyorkist:
Morsi camp claims Egypt presidency win
Brotherhood claims victory based on unofficial tallies, but SCAF decree limiting presidential powers overshadows count.
The Muslim Brotherhood has declared their candidate, Mohammed Morsi, the winner of Egypt's presidential runoff, and unofficial vote tallies show him leading the race by more than one million votes.
The group held a press conference early on Monday morning to announce Morsi's victory. With 12,793 of the country's roughly 13,000 polling stations reporting, Morsi had 12.7 million votes, while his opponent, Ahmed Shafiq, had 11.84 million, the group said.
[ ... ]
Rawya Rageh, our correspondent in Cairo, said: "The official schedule as per the Supreme Presidential Election Commission for the results to be announced is on the 21st of June, but as we have seen from previous elections the MB have a powerful organisation representatives at polling stations and almost always their figures turn out to be accurate.
"We are already seeing the celebrations images from Morsi supporters in Tahrir Square for them this is a done deal."
Guardian liveblog.
Greek election result fails to calm eurozone fear
Worried Banks Resist Fiscal Union
But for Europeans, there seems to be little appetite for such a compact right now. In fact, banks and their national regulators, anxious about the Greek elections and Spain’s hastily arranged bailout, are behaving more parochially than ever.
[ ... ]
Experts warn, though, that what is needed now is not another working paper proposing new levels of euro bureaucracy, but a clear action plan that addresses the root issue: markets and investors have lost faith in Europe’s ability to regulate its banks.
“Why do you think European banks won’t lend to Spanish banks?” asked Karel Lannoo, chief executive of the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies and an expert on bank regulation in Europe. “Because they do not trust Spanish regulators. Has Citigroup stopped lending to California? No. What we need is a single banking supervisor and a single settlement system like in the United States. And we have no time to lose.”
What A Real External Bank Bailout Looks Like
The cleanup from that crisis cost taxpayers about $125 billion (pdf), back when that was real money. As best I can tell, around 60 percent of the losses were in Texas (pdf). So that’s around $75 billion in aid — not loans, outright transfer.
Look at this. They are using the parents as the reason for privatization. Mayors backing the parents? Oh, I doubt that. There is money in this. Pretty brilliant coup though, to pit parents against teachers and have the millionaires slip in and grab some of that huge pot of public money for education. Parent Revolution? Parents who don't see this astroturf for what it is are beyond stupid. And who is behind this? The Democrats, from the top down. Congratulations, Obama. As if Walmart and Microsoft don't have enough of our money already and have not ruined enough communities already.
Mayors back parents seizing control of schools
(Reuters) - Hundreds of mayors from across the United States this weekend called for new laws letting parents seize control of low-performing public schools and fire the teachers, oust the administrators or turn the schools over to private management.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors, meeting in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday unanimously endorsed "parent trigger" laws aimed at bypassing elected school boards and giving parents at the worst public schools the opportunity to band together and force immediate change.
[ ... ]
But in a sign of the unions' diminishing clout, their traditional political allies, the Democrats, abandoned them in droves during the Orlando vote.
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Though it has not yet been shown to work, parent trigger has support from many of the big players seeking to inject more free-market competition into public education, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.
Major philanthropies and wealthy financiers have poured money into backing political candidates and advocacy groups, including one called Parent Revolution, that promote parent trigger, according to campaign finance records in several states.
Matt Taibbi
Senators Grovel, Embarrass Themselves at Dimon Hearing
You can either be a commercial bank, with all the federal support that entails, or you can be a high-risk gambler. But you shouldn't be allowed to be both. We could have Chase Commercial Bank, and Chase Investments Inc., and they can each be as big as they want, but those companies should be separate. Why do we need companies like Chase that are both things, under one tent?
The real answer, from Jamie Dimon’s point of view, is simple – there’s no way he could have a $350 billion hedge fund if he didn’t have mountains of federally-insured money to play with, and a steady stream of low-interest loans from the Fed. Merkley points this out:
"How many companies on the planet have been offered half a trillion dollars in low-interest loans? Not many," he says. "But the basic concept of the Volcker rule is that banks are in the lending business, not the hedge fund business. Would you agree?"
Dimon, taking his time with this dangerous question, answers: "We’re not in the hedge fund business."
This is an obvious lie – that’s exactly what Chase’s CIO unit is, a giant hedge fund. Merkley goes on to point this out, noting that executives at CIO had already admitted that they were told to change their strategy and accumulate high-yield assets, and specifically risky credit derivatives, instead of safer, government-backed securities. Moreover, this was all at Dimon’s specific direction.
Americans fascinated with `Hatfields and McCoys'
The names remain forever linked, but now in a pursuit of commerce. Businesses from a liquor store to a car wash to a restaurant and inn capitalize on the Hatfield-McCoy name. And the fascination with the families' bloody past may help propel this hardscrabble patch of Appalachia toward a more prosperous future.
A three-night miniseries about the feud that spanned much of the last half of the 19th century set basic cable viewing records and sparked renewed interest in the Hatfields and the McCoys, who waged their own cross-border war between West Virginia and Kentucky. The History Channel drama starred Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton as the patriarchs ,, William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield in West Virginia and Randolph "Ole Ran'l" McCoy in Kentucky , and drew more than 13.9 million viewers the first night. The finale did even better, with 14.3 million viewers.
When Chomsky wept
I first met Noam Chomsky in Laos, where I showed him the devastating effects of U.S. air raids
I had grown up believing in American values but this bombing of innocent civilians violated every one of them. Looking at U.S. executive branch leaders from the perspective of a Lao refugee camp, I had learned in a few weeks that they were the enemy of human decency, democracy, human rights and international law abroad, and that in this real world might made right and crime paid. However much one believed America was a “nation of laws not men” at home, it was clearly a nation of cruel, brutal and lawless men in Laos.
Without any conscious decision on my part, I immediately found myself committing to do whatever I could to try and stop this unimaginable horror. As a Jew steeped in the Holocaust, I felt as if I had discovered the truth of Auschwitz and Buchenwald while the killing was still going on. I soon found myself working as hard as I could to take everyone I could find — including journalists like CBS’s Bernard Kalb, ABC’s Ted Koppel, the New York Times’ Flora Lewis — out to the camps in the hopes they would do stories about the bombing to expose it to the world.
One day I heard that three antiwar activists — Doug Dowd, Richard Fernandez and Noam Chomsky — were spending a few nights at the Hotel Lane Xang in Vientiane before catching the International Control Commission (ICC) aircraft for a week-long visit to Hanoi. (The only way to go to Hanoi at the time other than through Phnom Penh.) I called one of their rooms, introduced myself, we met, and Noam came out the next day to the village where I lived for dinner, planning to leave for Hanoi the day after.
Israel deports South Sudanese migrants
127 South Sudanese were airlifted to the South Sudanese capital, Juba, early on Monday. They were told by the security forces that they could either choose to leave, with a 1000 Euro offering from the government, or they would face an Israeli jail.
The Israeli government is responding to pressure from some elements of society to crack down on immigration from Africa. In recent protests, some locals voiced their concerns about the Jewish identity and the demographics of the state.
There are around 60,000 illegal African immigrants in the country, said Paul Hirschson, spokesperson for Israel's foreign ministry.
“If we don't take steps to disincentive them from coming, then more and more of them will come,” he said.
Troops sent to quell clashes in western Libya
Government sends military to stop clashes between rival armed groups that have killed 16 people.
Libya's government has sent troops to put an end to six days of clashes between rival armed groups in the west of the country.
The fighting, which left least 16 people killed and scores of others injured, is the latest episode of instability eight months since the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi's regime after a months-long conflict.
As it seeks to impose its authority on a fractious country, Libya's new leadership on Saturday called for an immediate ceasefire in the fighting south of the capital Tripoli.
Top Yemeni soldier killed in suicide blast
General Salem Ali Qatan, who led campaign against al-Qaeda in south of country, ambushed by bomber in port city of Aden.
The medic said the attacker "handed Qatan a paper, shook his hand and then detonated himself" as the general was walking to his office.
[ ... ]
Qatan was appointed in March just days after newly elected President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi took office and pledged to destroy al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the name given to the armed group's local Yemen branch.
'Huge loss for Yemen'
The post had been held for decades by General Mahdi Maqola, known for his close ties to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Saleh was accused by his opponents of allowing al-Qaeda to establish a stronghold in Yemen's mostly lawless south and east.
UN: 800,000 forced to flee their countries in 2011
GENEVA - Crises in Libya, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere prompted 800,000 people to flee their countries last year, the highest number in 11 years, the United Nations' refugee agency says.
A report issued Monday by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said that, including people who fled their homes but not their countries, the total number of newly displaced people worldwide in 2011 was 4.3 million. The number of new cross-border refugees was the highest since it hit 822,000 in 2000.
However, the total number who were either refugees, internally displaced or in the process of seeking asylum at the end of last year declined to 42.5 million from 43.7 million in 2010. The reason was that 3.2 million people who were uprooted but stayed inside their countries were able to return home, the highest rate in more than a decade, the agency said.
With more simplified news stories like this, maybe more Americans will become aware of what is going on.
shadow wars rely on drones, computers
WASHINGTON - After a decade of costly conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American way of war is evolving toward less brawn, more guile.
Drone aircraft spy on and attack terrorists with no pilot in harm's way. Small teams of special operations troops quietly train and advise foreign forces. Viruses sent from computers to foreign networks strike silently, with no American fingerprint.
It's war in the shadows, with the U.S. public largely in the dark.
Blog Posts of Interest
Transman proposes to partner at White House Pride celebration on DailyKos by rserven
P5 +1 Talks Resume in Moscow With Iran Sanctions Set to Ratchet Up on emptywheel.net by Jim White
Michael Hayden’s Stone Walling on emptywheel.net by emptywheel