Six In The Morning

The American Tax Payer Screwed Once Again    

Mortgage Giants Leave Legal Bills to the Taxpayers

Since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayers have spent more than $160 million defending the mortgage finance companies and their former top executives in civil lawsuits accusing them of fraud. The cost was a closely guarded secret until last week, when the companies and their regulator produced an accounting at the request of Congress.

The bulk of those expenditures – $132 million – went to defend Fannie Mae and its officials in various securities suits and government investigations into accounting irregularities that occurred years before the subprime lending crisis erupted. The legal payments show no sign of abating.

Don’t Believe Their Lying Eyes Or Yours Either

Palestinian negotiators have angrily dismissed accounts as lies, fabrications and half truths

Reaction to the leaked Palestine papers

As Palestinian negotiators named in the secret accounts of negotiations with Israel angrily dismissed them as lies, fabrications and half truths, there was an equally hostile backlash over their offer to let the Jewish state keep its settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and other concessions.

The two leading Palestinian negotiators named in the documents, Saeb Erekat and Ahmed Qureia, reacted furiously to the leaks. Erekat called them a “bunch of lies”. Qureia claimed that “many parts of the documents were fabricated, as part of the incitement against the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian leadership”.

China Is Taking The Out Of The World

The world knows that the Chinese economic boom has led to a huge increase in carbon emissions.  

The Choking of China – and the World

The world iswatching China’s economic surge with understandable awe – while politely and passively ignoring the country’s ecological disintegration.

When the journalist Jonathan Watts was a child, he was told, like so many of us: “If everyone in China jumps at exactly the same time, it will shake the earth off its axis and kill us all.” Three decades later, he stood in the grey sickly smog of Beijing, wheezing and hacking uncontrollably after a short run, and thought – the Chinese jump has begun. He had travelled 100,000 miles criss-crossing China, from the rooftop of Tibet to the deserts of Inner Mongolia and everywhere, he discovered that the Chinese state was embarked on a massive program of environmental destruction.

More Unhappiness In Thailand  

 

Protesting Thai Red Shirts call for release of leaders

About 30,000 anti-government Red Shirts rallied in Thailand’s capital yesterday in another show of strength that heralds a rocky run-up to an election due this year.

It was the second big rally this month by the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) and serves as a reminder of the polarisation that has plagued southeast Asia’s second-largest economy for the past five years.

The mostly rural and urban working-class Red Shirts marched from the upmarket shopping district they effectively closed for much of April and May last year to Democracy Monument in the city’s old quarter.

The protests last year were halted by a military crackdown. In all, 91 people were killed and many UDD leaders remain in detention – one of the reasons for the latest protests.

Talk About Broadcasting For The Wrong Side

 

Tunisia arrests TV channel owner for “treason”  

“The owner of Hannibal TV (Larbi Nasra), who is a relative of the former president’s wife, is using the channel to abort the youth’s revolution, spread confusion, incite strife and broadcast false information,” a statement citing an authorised source said.

“The aim is to create a constitutional vacuum, ruin stability and take the country into a vortex of violence that will bring back the dictatorship of the former president.” Veteran strongman Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown this month in a popular uprising over poverty, corruption and political repression that stunned Arab and Western governments who had longed backed Ben Ali as a bulwark against Islamists.

Seeking To Divide They Now Want Unity

 

Suddenly the statesman, Hezbollah’s Nasrallah calls for Lebanon unity government

Beirut

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant Shiite group, Hezbollah, called on Sunday for the creation of a national unity government to usher Lebanon out of a political crisis that threatens to deteriorate into sectarian violence.

“We [in the opposition] will request that the [new prime minister], yet to be named, forms a cabinet in which everyone participates,” Mr. Nasrallah said in a live televised address. “We are not calling for a cabinet that excludes any party in Lebanon.”

Nasrallah admitted in his address that his Hezbollah-led opposition bloc deliberately toppled Lebanon’s government two weeks ago with a massive pullout in order to stall pending international indictments of Hezbollah leaders for the 2005 murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. And his comments come on the eve of a parliamentary vote that could result in the formation of a new government dominated by Hezbollah and its political allies.