THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

It's David versus Goliath. A valley woman is taking on Bank of America and Fannie Mae, saying they foreclosed on her home while she was in the middle of a loan modification.

And making matters worse, the bank foreclosed while she was in Germany, visiting her son in a military hospital.

Before she got on the plane to go out of the country, she says she made sure everything was ok.

The bank knew she was going be gone -- but then a few days after she left, they foreclosed on her.

"Everything was empty. Everything. Upstairs, downstairs everything was empty," says Lilly Washington.

Washington was stunned when she returned home and found a "for sale" sign in her yard. She managed to get back into the home and immediately started making calls.

"I said 'where did you put my stuff from the house. Which storage.' They said, 'we don't put in storage, it is at the city dump.'"

Washington had just returned from visiting her wounded son in Germany. She was gone for a month and half. Her son's Purple Heart was thrown away too.

"I said, my gosh how can you take that. He is fighting for this country. And you steal from his home, everything," says Washington.

// posted by montag @ 7:06 PM 0 Comments

Jay Townsend, a campaign spokesman for Republican Rep. Nan Hayworth (NY-19), weighed in on a local Facebook discussion with a violent comment about Democratic women in Congress, and his suggestion is now earning the congresswoman condemnation from one of her Democratic challengers.

The Facebook page, called NY19 U.S. House of Representatives Discussion Center, encourages “civil multi-partisan discussion about issues impacting citizens of New York’s U.S. House District represented by Republican Congresswoman Nan Hayworth.” On it, a question about gas prices was also critical of Hayworth. Townsend responded to one commenter, Tom, by bringing up the “war on women” and suggested they “hurl some acid at those female democratic Senators.”

The comment:

Listen to Tom. What a little bee he has in his bonnet. Buzz Buzz. My question today … when is Tommy boy going to weigh in on all the Lilly Ledbetter hypocrites who claim to be fighting the War on Women? Let’s hurl some acid at those female democratic Senators who won’t abide the mandates they want to impose on the private sector.

// posted by montag @ 5:09 PM 0 Comments

Amazon plans to build two large distribution centers in New Jersey that would provide an estimated 1,500 full-time jobs and would also enable New Jersey to collect state sales tax from the online retailer, Gov. Chris Christie announced on Wednesday.

The building of the warehouses, each about a million square feet, is scheduled to begin next year and would also result in thousands of part-time and seasonal jobs.

Under the arrangement between Amazon and New Jersey, the state will start collecting state sales tax of 7 percent by July 1 of next year. In discussions with state officials, Amazon had been seeking a two-year reprieve before it would need to begin to collect tax.

// posted by montag @ 1:02 PM 0 Comments

Federal transportation officials citing serious safety concerns announced on Thursday that they had ordered the shutdown of 26 bus operators, many of them based in Chinatown and offering inexpensive rides along the East Coast to thousands of passengers a day.

In addition, 10 bus company owners, managers and employees were forced to cease all passenger transportation operations, including selling tickets, according to transportation officials who called it the biggest crackdown in the history of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

The operators cited had employed drivers who worked long hours, had serious driver qualification violations and, in many cases, did not have valid commercial driver's licenses, officials said. The companies also used vehicles that had not been regularly repaired or inspected.

// posted by montag @ 12:42 PM 0 Comments

Panelist Donny Deutsch followed up by asking whether Patrick thought that focusing on Bain is actually not the best strategy for Democrats at this point. Here’s his response:

Well, I think that the Bain strategy has been distorted in some of the public discussions. I think Bain is a perfectly fine company. They’ve got a role in the private economy and I’ve got a lot of friends there on both sides of the aisle. I don’t think Bain is the point.

// posted by montag @ 12:16 PM 0 Comments

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// posted by montag @ 7:12 PM 0 Comments

The S.E.C. in recent years has failed in almost every possible way a regulator can fail to police powerful criminals. Failure #1 was that it repeatedly fell down on the job even when alerted to problems at big companies well ahead of time by insiders. Six months before Lehman Brothers collapsed, setting off a chain reaction of losses that crippled the world economy, one of Lehman’s attorneys, Oliver Budde, contacted the S.E.C. to warn them that the firm had understated CEO Dick Fuld's income by more than $200 million; the agency blew him off. There were similar brush-offs of insiders with compelling information in cases involving Moody’s, Chase, and both of the major Ponzi scheme scandals, i.e. the Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford cases.

// posted by montag @ 6:44 PM 0 Comments

Six members of Florida’s congressional delegation are pushing Gov. Rick Scott (R) to stop purging the state’s voting rolls of eligible voters, after numerous individuals were improperly flagged as non-citizens.

The state used an outdated driver’s license database in their initial effort to scrub non-citizens from the voting rolls. Officials believed that 182,000 voters on the rolls were non-citizens, and began sending out notifications that required voters to prove their citizenship within 30 days.

But plenty of legal U.S. citizens who should be allowed to vote wound up on the purge list. In Miami-Dade County, 1,638 people were flagged by the state as “non-citizens,” yet at least 359 people provided the county with proof of citizenship and another 26 people were identified by the county as U.S. citizens, ThinkProgress reported. An analysis by the Miami Herald found that Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters were most likely to be targeted by the purge effort.

// posted by montag @ 5:05 PM 0 Comments

All the pundits and bloviating Beltway politicos ignored Beto O'Rourke's race against painfully long-term incumbent, Silvestre Reyes and said the young upstart had no chance. Even the commercialized progressive groups completely ignored his contest. But early voting went drastically in his direction and, despite Reyes, last minute, heavily funded (by the Military Industrial Complex) smear campaign, O'Rourke put him away nice and easy. Even as the votes were coming in, the most unctuous shills of the DC Establishment were hoping out loud that Beto would lose. This isn't about ideology, this is just about Establishment dick suckers sucking Establishment dick, which is what they get paid to do-- to the point where they become what they do. By the end they were publicly praying for a run-off or even a Republican victory in November. The Establishment and it's miserable foot soldiers are very threatened by insurgents... and victorious insurgents make them want to kill themselves.

// posted by montag @ 1:29 PM 0 Comments

Spooked by a sharply slowing economy, China’s leaders have begun opening the financial spigots to build still more roads and airports and subsidize consumer purchases, reprising measures that enabled the nation to sail mostly unscathed through the last great global recession.

But the leaders are signaling that the latest round of stimulus spending will fall far short of the four trillion renminbi, or $585 billion at the time, that the government poured into the economy in 2008 and 2009. That spurred a torrent of bank lending, part of it for dubious projects that many experts say will wind up bankrupt in coming years.

India’s coalition government just celebrated the third anniversary of its tenure with a self-congratulatory banquet that could not have been more poorly timed: India’s currency, the rupee, is falling; investment is down; inflation is rising; and deficits are eating away at government coffers.

While short-term growth has slowed but not ground to a halt, India’s problems have dampened hopes that it, along with China and other non-Western economies, might help revive the global economy, as happened after the 2008 financial crisis. Instead, India is now facing a political reckoning, as the country’s elected leaders must address difficult, politically unpopular decisions — or risk even deeper problems.

// posted by montag @ 1:22 PM 0 Comments

Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, condemned Mr. Obama on Tuesday for a “policy of paralysis” toward Syria that he said had allowed President Bashar al-Assad to “slaughter 10,000 individuals.”

But Mr. Romney’s own prescriptions for ending the mounting death toll in Syria have been less definitive than his denunciations of the president.

// posted by montag @ 12:45 PM 0 Comments

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter turned in 2,000 petition signatures to get on August primary ballot, but all except 244 have been deemed invalid because of rampant duplicated copies, the Michigan Secretary of State found.

A review by The Detroit News of the petition signatures found full copies of a sheet of signatures that were photocopied once and in some cases two times and mixed in with the 136-page stack of signatures. In some cases, a different petition circulator's name was signed to the duplicate copy.

The overt copying is "frankly unheard of," said Chris Thomas, Michigan's director of elections, as he thumbed through the stack of petitions. "It's amazing when you sit and look, and it starts to dwell on you what they've done."

The Secretary of State's office has turned over its preliminary findings to the state Attorney General's office, which would take up a potential criminal investigation of violations of election law.

McCotter has accepted the finding that he will not make the ballot and announced in Tuesday's Detroit News he will launch a write-in campaign.

"Having promised people I would seek another term in the United States Congress and, thereby, give them the chance to vote for, or against me, the only way to clean up my mess is to run a write-in campaign for the Republican nomination for Michigan's 11th Congressional District," McCotter wrote in the column.

// posted by montag @ 6:39 PM 0 Comments

“Mitt Romney’s continued embrace of Donald Trump and refusal to condemn his disgraceful conspiracy theories demonstrates his complete lack of moral leadership. Now he’s even standing by silently as Trump assails John McCain’s courage in standing up to the most extreme and hateful voices in the Republican Party—all in order to raise money for himself. If Mitt Romney lacks the backbone to stand up to a charlatan like Donald Trump because he’s so concerned about lining his campaign’s pockets, what does that say about the kind of president he would be?”

// posted by montag @ 4:21 PM 0 Comments

Diane Tran, a 17-year-old Willis High School junior, was sentenced to spent 24 hours in jail and pay $100 in fines for excessive truancy, according to CBS Atlanta [5].

She had broken a Texan law that makes it a crime to miss more than 10 days of school in a six month period, reported Local TV network KHOU-11 [6].

Judge Lanny Moriarty said that at an appearance by Tran in his Justice of the Peace court last month he warned her to stop missing school.

When she recently missed classes again, he issued a summons and had her arrested in open court when she appeared...

However, Diane is not the stereotypical truant one would expect in such a case.

She helps support two siblings with both a full time and part-time job. Her parents were divorced and she lived with the family that owns the wedding venue where she works on weekends.

"She goes from job to job from school," Devin Hill, one of Tran's classmates, told KHOU-11. "She stays up until 7:00 in the morning doing her homework."

According to KHOU-11, Tran admitted that she was often too tired to go to school.

She said she took AP Spanish, college level algebra and dual credit English and history courses.

 A petition at change.org [9] and a helpdianetran.com website has appeared after news of the year 11 student's plight spread online.

// posted by montag @ 3:48 PM 0 Comments

The poll appeared on the same day as headlines about Catholic Church leaders fighting President Obama’s attempt to get insurance coverage for contraception for women who work or go to college at Catholic institutions. The church insists it’s an argument about religious freedom, not birth control. But, really, it’s about birth control, and women’s lower caste in the church. It’s about conservative bishops targeting Democratic candidates who support contraception and abortion rights as a matter of public policy. And it’s about a church that is obsessed with sex in ways it shouldn’t be, and not obsessed with sex in ways it should be.

The bishops and the Vatican care passionately about putting women in chastity belts. Yet they let unchaste priests run wild for decades, unconcerned about the generations of children who were violated and raped and passed around like communion wine.

// posted by montag @ 12:38 PM 0 Comments

Efforts to suppress voting are not just selfish, there not just short-sighted. Voter restriction laws, that lead to an outcome based upon process instead upon merit, might be labeled – and I imagine even by our founding fathers – as treasonous.

// posted by montag @ 12:12 PM 0 Comments

1. “The idea that you’ve got private equity companies that come in and take companies apart so they can make profits and have people lose their jobs, that’s not what the Republican Party’s about.” — Rick Perry [New York Times, 1/12/12]

2. “The Bain model is to go in at a very low price, borrow an immense amount of money, pay Bain an immense amount of money and leave. I’ll let you decide if that’s really good capitalism. I think that’s exploitation.” — Newt Gingrich [New York Times, 1/17/12]

3. “Instead of trying to work with them to try to find a way to keep the jobs and to get them back on their feet, it’s all about how much money can we make, how quick can we make it, and then get out of town and find the next carcass to feed upon” — Rick Perry [National Journal, 1/10/12]

4. “We find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job.” — Newt Gingrich [Globe and Mail, 1/9/12]

5. “Now, I have no doubt Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company, Bain Capital, of all the jobs that they killed” — Rick Perry [New York Times, 1/9/12]

6) “He claims he created 100,000 jobs. The Washington Post, two days ago, reported in their fact check column that he gets three Pinocchios. Now, a Pinocchio is what you get from The Post if you’re not telling the truth.” — Newt Gingrich [1/13/12, NBC News]

7. “There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business, and I happen to think that’s indefensible” — Rick Perry [National Journal, 1/10/12]

8. “If Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years, then I would be glad to then listen to him” — Newt Gingrich [Mediaite, 12/14/11]

9. “If you’re a victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing, it’s the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and tell you he feels your pain, because he caused it.” — Rick Perry [New York Times, 1/8/12]

10. “They’re vultures that sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass. They leave with that and they leave the skeleton” — Rick Perry [National Journal, 1/10/12]

// posted by montag @ 10:22 PM 0 Comments

When he entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2011, Newt Gingrich was the prosperous head of a small empire commonly known as Newt Inc, which included both for-profit consultancies and nonprofit foundations.

Altogether, these entwined ventures pulled in more than $110 million over the past decade. Now the vestiges of this empire are mired in debt, as is Gingrich's campaign fund.

A bankruptcy proceeding under way in Atlanta will determine whether the one company still owned by Callista Gingrich, Gingrich Productions, will lose an expected payout that now constitutes the bulk of the Gingriches' net worth.

// posted by montag @ 5:15 PM 0 Comments

The program would be supported by donations to nonprofit scholarship groups, and Georgians who contributed would receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits, up to $2,500 a couple. The intent was that money otherwise due to the Georgia treasury — about $50 million a year — would be used instead to help needy students escape struggling public schools.

That was the idea, at least. But parents meeting at Gwinnett Christian Academy got a completely different story last year.

“A very small percentage of that money will be set aside for a needs-based scholarship fund,” Wyatt Bozeman, an administrator at the school near Atlanta, said during an informational session. “The rest of the money will be channeled to the family that raised it.”

A handout circulated at the meeting instructed families to donate, qualify for a tax credit and then apply for a scholarship for their own children, many of whom were already attending the school.

“If a student has friends, relatives or even corporations that pay Georgia income tax, all of those people can make a donation to that child’s school,” added an official with a scholarship group working with the school.

The exchange at Gwinnett Christian Academy, a recording of which was obtained by The New York Times, is just one example of how scholarship programs have been twisted to benefit private schools at the expense of the neediest children.

// posted by montag @ 1:02 PM 0 Comments

Speaking on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Monday evening, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) highlighted the “understandable fear” driving legislation like the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), but cautioned that the “gross negligence” of network operators is no reason to create “a Cyber Industrial Complex” that profits on Americans’ private data.

“It is a fundamental principle of cyber-security that any network whose failure could result in loss of life or significant property should be physically isolated from the Internet,” he said. “Unfortunately many of our critical network operators have violated this principle in order to save money or streamline operations. This sort of gross negligence should be the first target in any cyber-security program – not the privacy of individual Americans.”

CISPA, which passed the House in April thanks to party-line support by Republicans, would overwrite existing privacy laws to allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to act as an information sharing hub for corporate networks, placing a military agency in charge of Americans’ private data, ostensibly for the monitoring of potential cyber-threats.

// posted by montag @ 12:28 PM 0 Comments

The now ex-priest, John Fiala, was convicted yesterday of trying to hire a hit man in Dallas to kill the accuser in 2010. The jury that convicted him will decide his punishment. He faces up to life in prison...

UPDATE: The jury sentenced Fiala to 60 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole after 15 years...

The sex assault accuser is not being named because The Dallas Morning News generally does not identify possible victims of sex crimes. He also testified on Wednesday.

The 53-year-old former Roman Catholic priest faces separate charges he sexually assaulted the boy in West Texas several years ago, including at gunpoint.

The accuser said Fiala would help take him to see his girlfriend, who lived a few hours away. The attacks would sometimes occur in hotel rooms Fiala rented en route to see the girlfriend.

// posted by montag @ 10:46 PM 0 Comments

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. sued a group of banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Citigroup Inc. (C), Bank of America Securities and Deutsche Bank AG (DBK), in two suits over mortgage-backed securities.

The FDIC, acting as receiver for two failed banks, filed the suits in New York federal court today seeking money the banks allegedly lost on securities backed by residential mortgages. The suits claim a total of $77 million.

The FDIC filed an $11 million claim as receiver for Strategic Capital Bank, a Champaign, Illinois commercial bank that was closed by regulators in 2009. It filed a separate $66 million claim on behalf of Strategic Capital and Citizens National Bank.

The FDIC alleges the defendants misled investors in the registration statements for the securities.

// posted by montag @ 7:30 PM 0 Comments

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// posted by montag @ 7:18 PM 0 Comments

I do agree we’re spending too much on the military, but I believe in the military. But I believe we have too many investments in Cold War-era weapons. We don’t need all that nuclear stuff. We don’t need to have 174 bases. We don’t need to protect Europe. We don’t need to protect Japan. Let’s move toward a partnership instead of us monopolizing things. We spend more than the next 14 countries combined.

// posted by montag @ 12:14 PM 0 Comments

The United States Coast Guard and border patrol agents recovered nearly 8,000 pounds of marijuana Sunday evening off the coast of Dana Point, California.

According to CBS Los Angeles, the units used several boats to pick up the shockingly high volume of marijuana in the Pacific Ocean, which is street valued at $3.6 million.

“The boat itself, I mean, it had probably a hundred bales of all, wrapped in a garbage bag,” witness Andrew Charleston said. “The guys, when they were picking it up, were taking it place to place. It was huge. There was a lot of weight in there.”

// posted by montag @ 12:04 PM 0 Comments

Mr. Rajaratnam’s conviction, in the largest insider-trading scandal in a generation, handed a much-needed win to the beleaguered S.E.C. Only two years earlier, the commission had been lambasted for missing glaring evidence of Bernard L. Madoff’s vast Ponzi scheme.

But Mr. Parmigiani and others suspect that the P.R. of the Galleon case glosses over risks that insider trading can and does occur regularly at many Wall Street firms. In their view, it has become institutionalized. The flow of information between a firm’s analysts, its traders and its clients — a lucrative heads-up on stock upgrades and downgrades, for instance — can bolster trading profits, brokerage commissions and, ultimately, Wall Street paydays. Those in the know can get rich before the rest of us know what happened.

“Prosecutors say insider trading won’t be tolerated, that this is justice,” Mr. Parmigiani says of the Galleon case. “But they refuse to acknowledge that their widespread net has a very big hole in it.”

// posted by montag @ 12:57 PM 0 Comments

I ALWAYS liked that the name of my religion was also an adjective meaning all-embracing.

I was a Catholic and I wanted to be catholic, someone engaged in a wide variety of things. As James Joyce wrote in “Finnegans Wake:” “Catholic means ‘Here comes everybody.’ ”

So it makes me sad to see the Catholic Church grow so uncatholic, intent on loyalty testing, mind control and heresy hunting. Rather than all-embracing, the church hierarchy has become all-constricting.

// posted by montag @ 12:33 PM 0 Comments

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes God smiles on us. Last week, he smiled on investigative reporters everywhere, when the lawyers for Goldman, Sachs slipped on one whopper of a legal banana peel, inadvertently delivering some of the bank’s darker secrets into the hands of the public.

The lawyers for Goldman and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch have been involved in a legal battle for some time – primarily with the retail giant Overstock.com, but also with Rolling Stone, the Economist, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. The banks have been fighting us to keep sealed certain documents that surfaced in the discovery process of an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit filed by Overstock against the banks.

Last week, in response to an Overstock.com motion to unseal certain documents, the banks’ lawyers, apparently accidentally, filed an unredacted version of Overstock’s motion as an exhibit in their declaration of opposition to that motion. In doing so, they inadvertently entered into the public record a sort of greatest-hits selection of the very material they’ve been fighting for years to keep sealed.

I contacted Morgan Lewis, the firm that represents Goldman in this matter, earlier today, but they haven’t commented as of yet. I wonder if the poor lawyer who FUBARred this thing has already had his organs harvested; his panic is almost palpable in the air. It is both terrible and hilarious to contemplate. The bank has spent a fortune in legal fees trying to keep this material out of the public eye, and here one of their own lawyers goes and dumps it out on the street.

// posted by montag @ 7:07 PM 0 Comments

NATO’s summit will open Sunday afternoon in Chicago as NATO summits do, with pomp and blather about a needed, purposeful, unified, stronger, more efficient Alliance. As austerity’s cousin, “efficiency” will receive buzzword status this year in the form of “Smart Defence,” NATO’s shiny new concept and the source of the sad, unintentional irony at the heart of this summit. This irony will become apparent when NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stands before the world and touts Smart Defence in the same breath as he applauds NATO’s commitment to an epically dumb Washington-led boondoggle called the European Phased Adaptive Approach Missile Defense System.

The mouthful of a name contains the basics of the system. It is based in Europe, will be rolled out in phases, and, compared to the Bush-era system it replaced, was sold as an adaptive approach to some of the political and technological realities of European missile defense. It is the first missile defense project to be officially embraced by NATO allies, who historically have been left cold by the American faith that high-speed warheads can reliably be struck by other missiles hundreds of miles above the earth. Officially, consensus-run NATO has gotten religion. In Chicago, all 28 Alliance members will stand behind the outrageous lie that the first of the system’s four phases has achieved “interim operational capability.” NATO brass will declare with a straight face that a foundation has been laid for the next three phases scheduled between now and 2020. The U.S. is so excited it couldn’t wait for Chicago, and last week Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery said that Phase 1 — a triad of Aegis ships equipped with interceptor batteries, a command-and-control base in Ramstein, Germany, and a radar in Turkey — now “provides an initial capability to provide some level of defense of Europe against a threat emanating from the Middle East.”

Montgomery’s claim is one of the most expensive cons ever to grace the wires of the Armed Forces Press Service.

But unlike other Pentagon pet projects infamous for criminal cost overruns, missile defense can never be finished. This is its beauty. It is a perpetual-motion defense sector profit machine, one that never stops chasing a dream over the horizon point in the the MDA’s logo. Missile defense exists on an endless continuum of new development contracts for next-generation radars, sensors, interceptors and lasers. A full-proof system will always be more necessary than ever, and just around the corner, almost within reach, despite what the scientists and the evidence may say. And until then, at least we’re doing our best to provide what Admiral Montgomery calls “some level of defense” against emerging missile threats.

// posted by montag @ 12:43 PM 0 Comments

To a few hundred New York workers laboring for $8 or $9 an hour, a living wage bill recently passed by the city council means a raise, a few dollars more a week to help feed their families.

To billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg, it's a wedge to open the door to communism. That's right -- the mayor told a local radio program that requiring businesses that get taxpayer subsidies to pay their workers a little bit more is just like a centrally planned economy. “The last time we really had a big managed economy was the USSR, and that didn’t work out so well,” Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg is just fine with handing over millions of New Yorkers' dollars in taxpayer subsidies to companies that threaten to flee the city -- no complaints about “free market” capitalism when it's wealthy real estate developers getting the dough. Requiring those businesses that are happily slurping at the public trough to pay their workers a dollar or two more an hour, though, is just opening the door to Stalin.

// posted by montag @ 12:27 PM 0 Comments

State Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin surrendered to authorities this afternoon to face nine criminal counts pertaining to her alleged use of state resources for campaign purposes...

"It now appears that not only was Justice Orie Melvin directly and knowingly involved in using state paid staffers from both the judicial and legislative branches of the Pennsylvania government in her political campaign activities, but it also appears that she was aided in those endeavors by two accomplices, co-conspirator and siblings -- Janine Mary Orie and Jane Clare Orie," according to the presentment.

Two sisters, state Sen. Jane Orie, R-McCandless, and Janine Orie were charged in April 2010 with misusing the senator's legislative staff to do campaign work. Janine Orie worked for the justice from 1997 until 2010.

Jane Orie was convicted on 14 of 24 criminal counts in March and will be sentenced June 4. Janine Orie's case was severed and is scheduled for August.

// posted by montag @ 12:13 PM 0 Comments

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// posted by montag @ 7:12 PM 0 Comments

Curt Schilling is a hero to New England baseball fans, known for his performances in high pressure situations. But as a businessman, he’s in big trouble, and not the kind he can pitch his way out of.

The former MLB all-star’s start-up video game company, 38 Studios, missed a $1.1 million payment to the state of Rhode Island on May 1, and things have only gotten more complicated since.

Rhode Island lured 38 Studios away from Massachusetts in 2010, in exchange for $75 million in guaranteed loans. At the time, then-Governor Donald Carcieri, a Republican, considered the company a chance to jump-start a new business sector in the state. The company promised to create 450 jobs in three years. Massachusetts officials declined to match Rhode Island’s offer. Earlier this year, the company’s first game, “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning,” came out to positive reviews. “It sings with infectious, engaging excellence,” raved The New York Times.

But the company missed a payment earlier this month, and Schilling was forced to ask for more public assistance this week, The Boston Globe reports. The company said it did not have enough money to make payroll for its nearly 300 employees. The Rhode Island official who oversaw the loan guarantee resigned on Wednesday. And the troubles reached an absurd high point on Thursday, when the company hand-delivered a check to the state for $1.1 million before warning that it didn’t have the funds to cover it.

// posted by montag @ 5:07 PM 0 Comments

For years now, Greeks have been bombarded with warnings about the dire consequences of leaving the euro, and never more so than since the recent, indecisive election that left the country saddled with a caretaker government. But those pronouncements seem to be falling on increasingly deaf ears, and for one simple reason, as one woman explained as she stood in central Syntagma Square:

“We have nothing to lose,” she said. “We have no fear.”

// posted by montag @ 12:50 PM 1 Comments

An airline pilot came close to crashing his plane near Denver, Colorado this week after encountering a mysterious object in the sky thought to be an unmanned drone aircraft.

A tape recording made available this week confirms that the pilot of a Cessna Citation 525 CJ1 radioed air traffic controllers outside of Denver on Monday after nearly colliding with an unidentified flying object. Several factors have suggested that the aircraft was most likely a robotic drone aircraft.

According to the record, the pilot came close to hitting what he described as “a large remote-controlled aircraft.”

The Cessna’s pilot says that the craft was encountered at around 8,000 feet above sea level, or 2,800 feet above the ground in near the highly elevated city of Denver.

Speaking to reporters at 9News, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed that the agency is attempting to make sense of the unusual encounter.

“The threat is there from a collision standpoint. We'll do as much as we can here to try to track back what time it was,” the FAA’s Mike Fergus says of the group’s investigation.

Greg Feith, a former investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, adds to 9News that, whatever the pilot encountered, is a threat no matter how you look at it.

"That's an issue because now we have something in controlled airspace that poses a danger," says Feith.

// posted by montag @ 12:32 PM 0 Comments

On Tuesday, Floridians were apprised of the early results of the standardized writing test that Florida’s 4th, 8th, and 10th graders take, known as FCAT Writes. Last year, 81% of students taking the test earned a 4 or better, out of a 6-point scale, meaning they had “passed” the test. This year, 27% of 4th graders passed. Yep, that’s right, 27%. 8th and 10th graders scored only slightly higher at 33% and 38% respectively. The same state that boasted of its pass rate in 2011 was shame-faced to report the results in 2012. What happened? Did Florida’s teachers forget how to teach to a test? Did Florida’s students just become stupid in one year? No, but the State Board of Education sure screwed up, and Tuesday afternoon, they reluctantly voted to LOWER the passing score to a 3 out of 6, so that approximately 81% of the students will pass this year. They’re grading on a curve. Why are they grading on the curve? Because the FCAT has so many tentacles to other elements of education in Florida, so that when the FCAT shows us to be invalid, it affects many other things.

// posted by montag @ 12:14 PM 0 Comments

Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro — that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union — could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs — both economic and, arguably even more important, political — could be huge.

This doesn’t have to happen; the euro (or at least most of it) could still be saved. But this will require that European leaders, especially in Germany and at the European Central Bank, start acting very differently from the way they’ve acted these past few years. They need to stop moralizing and deal with reality; they need to stop temporizing and, for once, get ahead of the curve.

I wish I could say that I was optimistic...

So will Europe finally rise to the occasion? Let’s hope so — and not just because a euro breakup would have negative ripple effects throughout the world. For the biggest costs of European policy failure would probably be political.

Think of it this way: Failure of the euro would amount to a huge defeat for the broader European project, the attempt to bring peace, prosperity and democracy to a continent with a terrible history. It would also have much the same effect that the failure of austerity is having in Greece, discrediting the political mainstream and empowering extremists.

// posted by montag @ 10:38 PM 1 Comments

As Wal-Mart reported higher-than-expected first-quarter earnings on Thursday, it also disclosed that the scope of an investigation into foreign bribery issues at the retailer seemed to have widened.

The Wal-Mart board’s audit committee is examining not just possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act at its Mexican subsidiary, as previously disclosed by the company, but “other alleged crimes or misconduct in connection with foreign subsidiaries,” the company said in a regulatory filing. And while Wal-Mart said in December that it did not expect the bribery accusations to hurt the company, it backed away from that assertion on Thursday.

“Although the Company does not presently believe that these matters will have a material adverse effect on its business, given the inherent uncertainties in such situations, the Company can provide no assurance that these matters will not be material to its business in the future,” the filing said.

// posted by montag @ 1:09 PM 0 Comments

The U.S. has plans in place to attack Iran if necessary to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, Washington's envoy to Israel said, days ahead of a crucial round of nuclear talks with Tehran.

Dan Shapiro's message resonated Thursday far beyond the closed forum in which it was made: Iran should not test Washington's resolve to act on its promise to strike if diplomacy and sanctions fail to pressure Tehran to abandon its disputed nuclear program.

Shapiro told the Israel Bar Association the U.S. hopes it will not have to resort to military force.

"But that doesn't mean that option is not fully available. Not just available, but it's ready," he said. "The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it's ready."

// posted by montag @ 1:04 PM 0 Comments

The trading losses suffered by JPMorgan Chase have surged in recent days, surpassing the bank’s initial $2 billion estimate by at least $1 billion, according to people with knowledge of the losses.

When Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, announced the losses last Thursday, he indicated they could double within the next few quarters. But that process has been compressed into four trading days as hedge funds and other investors take advantage of JPMorgan’s distress, fueling faster deterioration in the underlying credit market positions held by the bank...

Traders at the unit’s London desk and elsewhere are now frantically trying to defuse the huge bet that was built up over years, but started generating erratic returns in late March. After a brief pause, the losses began to mount again in late April, prompting Mr. Dimon’s announcement on May 10.

Beginning on Friday, the same trends that had been causing the losses for six weeks accelerated, since traders on the opposite side of the bet knew the bank was under pressure to unwind the losing trade and could not double down in any way.

Another issue is that the trader who executed the complex wager, Bruno Iksil, is no longer on the trading desk. Nicknamed the London Whale, Mr. Iksil had a firm grasp on the trade — knowledge that is hard to replace, even though his anticipated departure is seen as sign of the bank’s taking responsibility for the debacle.

// posted by montag @ 12:47 PM 0 Comments

It remains unclear whether the D.E.A. agents took part in the shooting during either episode, the first in the early hours of May 6 and the second early last Friday. In an initial account of the second episode, the Honduran government told local reporters that two drug traffickers had been killed and a large shipment of cocaine seized; he did not mention any American involvement. Several American officials said the D.E.A. agents did not return fire during the encounter.

But this week, a local mayor and a Honduran lawmaker said that four innocent bystanders had been killed and called for an investigation into what the Honduran news media are now portraying as a botched D.E.A. operation.

Lucio Baquedano, the mayor of Ahuas, a small town near the incident, told El Tiempo, a Honduran newspaper, that a helicopter-borne unit consisting of both Honduran police officers and D.E.A. agents was pursuing a boatload of drug smugglers when it mistakenly opened fire on another boat carrying villagers. Four people died — including two pregnant women — and four others were wounded, he said.

// posted by montag @ 12:41 PM 0 Comments

Nearly three out of four Americans believe that the federal government should respect state laws regarding medical marijuana and halt raids on dispensaries, according to a poll released Wednesday.

“These results are consistent with the clear and growing body of evidence that documents substantial voter support for the legalization of medical marijuana,” said Larry Harris, a principal with Mason-Dixon Polling & Research.

The polling agency found that 74 percent of Americans believed the federal government should respect states’ medical marijuana laws. Support for medical marijuana laws was highest among Independents, at 79 percent, and lowest among Republicans, at 67 percent. Younger age groups were more likely to think the federal government should respect medical marijuana laws than older age groups.

// posted by montag @ 12:06 PM 0 Comments

The cost of the US-led war effort in Afghanistan is about to rise by $365 million annually under an agreement that would reopen a key NATO supply route through Pakistan that’s been closed for nearly six months.

The accord, which the Pakistani government announced late Tuesday, would revive the transport of vital supplies of food and equipment from Pakistani ports overland to land-locked Afghanistan.

In return, the US-led coalition will pay Pakistan a still-to-be-fixed fee of $1,500 to $1,800 for each truck carrying supplies, a tab that officials familiar with negotiations estimated would run nearly $1 million a day. The officials requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to reveal details of the agreement.

// posted by montag @ 11:44 PM 1 Comments

Tucked away in the House Armed Services Committee’s proposed Pentagon budget is a provision that could bring the U.S. military’s ambitious foray into biofuels to a screeching halt.

Earlier this week, the Republican-led committee voted to ban the Department of Defense from purchasing alternative fuels that cost more than “traditional” fossil fuels.
That would eliminate several emerging biofuels that have undergone successful testing by the Air Force and Navy over the past year on aircraft and ships.

The Army has also been developing alternative fuel technologies for ground vehicles, such as a high tech steam engine that can run on a variety of fuels, including biofuels.

The Air Force has been test-flying a 50-50 blend of camelina and jet fuel in public displays of its high-performance Thunderbirds demonstration team. Camelina is a weedy plant in the mustard family.

The Navy has been testing a variety of biofuels in ships and aircraft, including its own Blue Angels aerial demonstration team. Along with camelina, the Navy’s tests include algae and waste grease.

// posted by montag @ 5:17 PM 0 Comments

“To me it is not controversial,” she told KFNS radio. “He is a famous Missourian. He made a difference in talk radio. I know the family quite well, they are very patriotic and have contributed a lot to our state, and I’m proud that he is being inducted. It was a very nice ceremony and he had some great things to say about Missouri.”

The Associated Press described the induction on Monday as a “secretive ceremony,” noting that the event was closed to the public and only certain guests, including more than 100 Republican lawmakers, were allowed to attend. Police stood guard outdoors to prevent uninvited guests from entering.

// posted by montag @ 11:08 AM 0 Comments

The Legion of Christ religious order, still reeling from revelations that its late founder was a pedophile, admitted Wednesday that it knew that its most famous priest had fathered a child years ago yet didn't remove him from teaching morality to seminarians or speaking publicly about ethics.

In a statement, the Legion said it was sorry it hadn't acted "earlier and more firmly" to remove the Rev. Thomas Williams from his very public ministry as a spokesman, author and high-profile television personality. It said it took responsibility for the lapse, but didn't admit when Williams' superiors knew of the existence of his child.

Williams, an American moral theologian and former superior of the Legion's Rome general office, admitted Tuesday he had had a relationship with a woman and had fathered a child "a number of years ago." He didn't identify the woman or say whether he is supporting the child, though the Legion said the child is being cared for.

Williams' admission was issued after The Associated Press last week confronted the order with the allegation against Williams, which was lodged by a Spanish association of Legion victims. The association's accusations, sent to the Legion and Vatican several weeks ago, also named other Legion priests accused of sexually abusing minors.

The Legion has been beset by scandal following revelations that its late founder, the Rev. Marciel Maciel, fathered three children with two women and sexually abused his seminarians. Maciel died in 2008, and in 2009 the Legion admitted to his crimes. The Maciel scandal has been particularly sensational given that the Mexican-born priest was held up by Pope John Paul II as a model for the faithful, with his priests admired for their orthodoxy and ability to bring in money and attract new seminarians.

// posted by montag @ 10:29 PM 0 Comments

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has ordered the Air Force to restrict flights of its new F-22 stealth fighters because of continuing problems with the aircraft's oxygen system.

At least 22 pilots have suffered from oxygen deprivation while in flight since April 2008.

Panetta on Tuesday ordered that all F-22 flights remain within a "proximate distance" of an airfield in case a pilot should suffer from a hypoxia event and be forced to land. That will force an immediate end to F-22 patrol missions over Alaska.

Panetta also ordered the Air Force to accelerate installment of a backup oxygen system in all F-22s and provide monthly progress reports on efforts to identify the problem with the current oxygen system. The Air Force does not expect to begin installing automatic backup oxygen systems until December of this year.

// posted by montag @ 7:24 PM 0 Comments

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

// posted by montag @ 7:20 PM 0 Comments

On Wednesday, Mitt Romney brings his campaign to Florida for a speech and a fundraiser. He will no doubt brag that he alone has the experience to create jobs in America ... but somehow I imagine he won't be telling any stories about this aspect of his experience: the story of how Bain Capital loaded up medical company Dade Behring with debt, allowing it to extract $342 million in profit before firing 850 of the company's Florida-based employees and declaring bankruptcy.

// posted by montag @ 5:54 PM 0 Comments

In the years leading up to JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion trading loss, risk managers and some senior investment bankers raised concerns that the bank was making increasingly large investments involving complex trades that were hard to understand. But even as the size of the bets climbed steadily, these former employees say, their concerns about the dangers were ignored or dismissed.

An increased appetite for such trades had the approval of the upper echelons of the bank, including Jamie Dimon, the chief executive, current and former employees said.

Initially, this led to sharply higher investing profits, but they said it also contributed to the bank’s lowering its guard.

“There was a lopsided situation, between really risky positions and relatively weaker risk managers,” said a former trader with the chief investment office, the JPMorgan unit that suffered the recent loss. The trader and other former employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of the investigations into the trading losses.

Instead, the bank maintains that the losses were largely the fault of the chief investment office. Overall tolerance for risky trading did not increase, current executives said, just the scale of the office’s activities because of the bank’s acquisition of Washington Mutual in 2008 and its more risky credit portfolio.

// posted by montag @ 11:30 AM 1 Comments