SHOTS FIRED: Russia Calls Out on Gaddafi Death

As politicians in Western capitals were taking quiet pleasure in the capture and killing of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi yesterday, opinions elsewhere were divided.

In Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the Geneva Conventions had been breached with the killing of Colonel Gaddafi.

“We have to lean on facts and international laws,” Mr Lavrov said. “They say that a captured participant of an armed conflict should be treated in a certain way. And in any case, a prisoner of war should not be killed.”

Russia has been critical of Nato military action in Libya, saying that it has gone well beyond the stated mission of saving civilian life. The main concern for Moscow now is whether the new Libyan authorities will honour contracts signed by the Gaddafi regime. As well as the oil and arms trade, Russian Railways had secured a £2bn contract to construct a railway line between Sirte and Benghazi. Moscow recognised the National Transitional Council as the official government of Libya last month and said it expected all existing contracts to be honoured.

China, which like Russia abstained in the Security Council vote on whether to use force against Colonel Gaddafi’s troops, was quicker yesterday to change its tune. Beijing initially refused to support the rebels and had been highly critical of the bombing campaign. But as realities on the ground altered, in recent weeks the Chinese government had started to engage with the rebel movement.

“A new page has been turned in the history of Libya,” a foreign ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said yesterday. “We hope Libya will rapidly embark on an inclusive political process … and allow the people to live in peace and happiness,” she said.

A sign of the official policy change could be discerned in the language that Chinese state media used to refer to Colonel Gaddafi. Newspapers and agencies run by the state, which had previously referred to a “Middle East strongman”, had yesterday made a small but significant change to their phrasing, calling him a “madman” instead.

Reaction from other enemies of the US was varied. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez described the dead dictator as a “martyr”, while Iran’s foreign ministry tried to banish any parallels between the Libyan revolution and anti-government protests at home. “Despots and oppressors throughout history have no fate other than destruction and death,” a spokesman said. He called Colonel Gaddafi’s killing a “great victory” but added that all foreign forces must now pull out of the country.

And the eccentric Russian politician Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who is also the head of the World Chess Federation, said that Colonel Gaddafi’s death was a “tragedy” but that he died as a martyr and would be reincarnated.

Mr Ilyumzhinov made a surreal mission to Tripoli in June, where he met with Colonel Gaddafi as an unofficial mediator and played a game of chess with him. Yesterday, he said in a Russian newspaper interview that he had spoken to the Libyan leader numerous times on the phone since. He claimed that Colonel Gaddafi had not been scared of death: “Not a bit! He believed in reincarnation.”

SOURCE 

 

Comments »

Although Obama’s latest poll numbers are higher (barely) than 37%,  he has tied his re-election hopes to a bunch of  dumb asses who like to copulate in public and sleep in excrement.

Good luck with that one, buddy.

For fun, note the blatant AP bias in the first sentence. Let’s rewrite it, shall we? “Slightly fewer than two-thirds of the country find the Wall Street protests to be bullshit, and almost the same amount say they think American’s politicians are full of shit as well.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than one-third of the country supports the Wall Street protests, and even more – 58 percent – say they are furious about America’s politics.

The number of angry people is growing as deep reservoirs of resentment grip the country, according to the latest Associated Press-GfK poll.

Some 37 percent of people back the protests that have spread from New York to cities across the country and abroad, one of the first snapshots of how the public views the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. A majority of those protest supporters are Democrats, but the anger about politics in general is much more widespread, the poll indicates.

“They’ve got reasons to be upset, they’ve got reasons to protest, but they’re protesting against the wrong people,” Jan Jarrell, 54, a retired school custodian from Leesville, S.C., says of the New York demonstrators. “They need to go to Washington, to Congress and the White House. They’re the ones coming up with all the rules.”

Read the rest here.

Comments »

An eviction notice for their vagrancy was served today.

 

Full article

Comments »

Last night’s General Assembly meeting in Zuccotti Park was “one of most contentious ever,” in large part due to a heated debate over whether the drummers at Occupy Wall Street should be given $8,000 from the movement’s coffers to buy more drums and equipment. It seems some of the drums were stolen or vandalized, and the drummers asked the General Assembly to help them regroup. “We have worked for you! Appreciate us,” one drummer told the crowd, but the appeal was denied, and the Huff Post’s Craig Kanalley tweeted, “Drummer who didn’t get money from GA tonight now yelling, cursing at members of GA.” Meanwhile, another member of the drum corps was lashing out at the Community Board meeting.

Full article

Comments »

The inevitable raids on their stuff by homeless addicts vomiting their way across the makeshift camps has already given rise to a kind of Occupy camp security, the most basic duty of a government. And note, one that isn’t being performed well on our border, but the Occupiers don’t care about that.

Next will come a kind of feudalism, as various Occupation (without vocation) voices vie for power and control and minions form factions. And after that, the revolution will become just another institution. That’s the arc of history, being played out by college students who probably don’t even know enough history to be able to grasp the irony of it all.

Until the Occupiers vault from their primitive state to a Leninist oligarchy (a process which should take another week or so), supposing they don’t just dissolve once they realize that camping out in urban parks paid for by others is no way to go through life or feed yourself, let’s enjoy their principled devotion to Luddism. The Occupiers apparently don’t like modern sound amplification equipment. Maybe because they’re taking a principled stand against the corporations that manufacture speakers and wire. Maybe it’s because they’re objecting to the non-green sources of electricity that such equipment demands. Maybe they’re still mad at Bob Dylan’s Woodstock set. Or maybe it’s because they couldn’t get their billionaire backers to spring for the speaker rental fees and power lines. Who knows, and who cares, really? When the attitude and the moment produce an anvil chorus of Commies cheerfully, mindlessly aping whatever an aging radical hippie professor says to them, it’s gold. It’s also a mild form of brainwashing, which uses the pressure of the group and chant to create and enforce conformity.

Full Article

Comments »

The drummers claim that the finance working group even levied a percussion tax of sorts, taking up to half of the $150-300 a day that the drum circle was receiving in tips. “Now they have over $500,000 from all sorts of places,” said Engelerdt. “We’re like, what’s going on here? They’re like the banks we’re protesting.”

All belongings and money in the park are supposed to be held in common, but property rights reared their capitalistic head when facilitators went to clean up the park, which was looking more like a shantytown than usual after several days of wind and rain. The local community board was due to send in an inspector, so the facilitators and cleaners started moving tarps, bags, and personal belongings into a big pile in order to clean the park.

But some refused to budge. A bearded man began to gather up a tarp and an occupier emerged from beneath, screaming: “You’re going to break my fucking tent, get that shit off!” Near the front of the park, two men in hoodies staged a meta-sit-in, fearful that their belongings would be lost or appropriated.

Daniel Zetah, a 35-year-old lead facilitator from Minnesota, mounted a bench. “We need to clear this out. There are a bunch of kids coming to stay here.” One of the hoodied men fought back: “I’m not giving up my space for fucking kids. They have parents and homes. My parents are dead. This is my space.”

Other organizers were more blunt. “If you don’t want to be part of this group, then you can just leave,” yelled a facilitator in a button-down shirt, “Every week we clean our house.” Seth Harper, the pro-drummer proletarian, chimed in on the side of the sitters. “We disagree on how we should clean it. A lot of us disagree with the pile.” Zetah, tall and imposing with a fiery red beard, closed debate with a sigh. “We’re all big boys and girls. Let’s do this.” As he told me afterwards, “A lot of people are like spoiled children.” The cure? A cold snap. “Personally, I cannot wait for winter. It will clear out these people who aren’t here for the right reasons. Bring on the snow. The real revolutionaries will stay in -50 degrees.”

“The sunshine protestors will leave,” said “Zonkers,” a 20-year-old cleaner and longtime occupier from Tennessee. (He asked that his name not be used due to a felony marijuana conviction.) “The people who remain are the people who care. You get a lot of crust punks, silly kids, people who want to panhandle … It disgusts me. These people are here for a block party.”

Full article

Another Full article

One more Full article

Comments »

Brian Sullivan from CNBC reported the million dollar contest was suspended due to a “technical glitch” with currency issues that was exploited by some users to jump to the top of the list.

ROFL.

In other words,  they got hacked and/or were incredibly inept in forming this contest. This should have been dealt with before the contest commenced, obviously. As a result, ALL ACCOUNTS WIILL BE RESET and trading will resume 10/30.

Comments »

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) — Even before Moammar Gadhafi’s death Thursday, the Treasury Department was already starting to thaw some $37 billion worth of frozen Libyan assets to make them available to the new government in Tripoli.

The new Libyan government will get all the money. Eventually.

Earlier this year, the United States froze its piece of what some analysts believe to be as much as $150 billion in assets that had been available to the Gadhafi regime around the world.

Outside of the United States, those assets range from real estate to stakes in the Italian bank UniCredit, the British publisher Pearson, which owns the Financial Times, and Italy’s soccer club Juventus.

Comments »

Tripoli, Libya (CNN) — The United Nations and two major human rights groups called for an investigation into the death of Moammar Gadhafi on Friday amid questions over the last moments of the late Libyan strongman’s life.

“There seem to be four or five different versions of how he died,” the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a statement. “More details are needed to ascertain whether he was killed in the fighting or after his capture.”

Questions also persisted about what would happen to Gadhafi’s body. His family issued a statement Friday calling on the United Nations and Amnesty International to push Libya’s new leadership “to hand over the bodies of the martyrs of their tribe so they can be buried according to Islamic rites,” a pro-Gadhafi TV station reported.

Libya’s interim government, the National Transitional Council, has said Gadhafi’s burial will be delayed for few days to allow International Criminal Court officials to check the body in Misrata if they choose to do so.

Comments »

BRUSSELS (AP) – Finance ministers from the 17 countries that use the euro approved the payment of Greece’s next batch of bailout loans Friday, avoiding a potentially disastrous default, but acknowledged the country’s debt remained too high.

Greece’s debts are only one piece of Europe’s economic puzzle, and the finance ministers were meeting in Brussels on Friday to address two more complicated — and arguably more important — issues: boosting the financial firepower of the eurozone’s €440 billion ($607 billion) bailout fund in order to prevent the larger economies of Italy and Spain from spinning out of control and forcing weak banks to boost their capital buffers to shore up their defenses against market turmoil.

Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos welcomed the news that Athens would get the next €8 billion ($11 billion) installment, calling it a “positive step.” A day earlier, Greek lawmakers approved new, deeply contentious austerity measures.

The new measures will ensure next year’s fiscal targets are met and “sets the basis for the necessary structural reforms,” he said.

Comments »

__________________

Got problems? Tell Barack Obama. He can help. He might even give you money.

On more than one occasion, the president has cut personal checks to struggling Americans who’ve written to the White House, according to an excerpt from a new book by Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow about the ten letters the president reads every day.

“It’s not something I should advertise, but it has happened,” the president told Saslow.

How many times has President Obama intervened on someone’s behalf, and with what kind of problems does he help? Mortgage payments? Medical bills? And when he wants to help someone out with a personal check, how does it work? Does he send a check signed “Barack Obama” directly to the individual in need, or does he send the money to a bank or company on the person’s behalf? Do people even know when Obama has helped them out, or does the help arrive anonymously through a lawyer?

The White House declined to answer any questions about the practice.

FULL STORY HERE 

Comments »

_________________

A married mother of four from Florida ditched her family to become part of the raggedy mob in Zuccotti Park — keeping the park clean by day and keeping herself warm at night with the help of a young waiter from Brooklyn.

“I’m not planning on going home,” an unapologetic Stacey Hessler, 38, told The Post yesterday.

“I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m here indefinitely. Forever,” said Hessler, whose home in DeLand sits 911 miles from the tarp she’s been sleeping under.

Hessler — who ironically is married to a banker — arrived 12 days ago and planned to stay for a week, but changed her plans after cozying up to some like-minded radicals, including Rami Shamir, 30, a waiter at a French bistro in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

She swears she’s not romantically involved with her new friend.

Yesterday was a typical day for the pair, who woke up at 8 a.m. on their little patch of paving stone near the communal kitchen and dashed off to Trinity Church to wash up.

Hessler emerged an hour later, her brown hair in dreadlocks, wearing a T-shirt depicting Han Solo and Princess Leia kissing, and bearing the slogan “Make Love Not War.”

She got coffee and a granola bar from the protest kitchen before sorting laundry for two hours.

The unemployed Long Island native compared her decision to abandon her family to Americans serving in the armed forces.

“Military people leave their families all the time, so why should I feel bad?” a defiant Hessler said. “I’m fighting for a better world.”

She said she had been following the movement on Facebook, and the more she learned, the more obsessed she became with joining the demonstrators.

At around 11 a.m. yesterday, Hessler moved from laundry duty to park cleanup — a four-hour detail from which she broke just once to give a troubled protester a hug at the “empathy table.” She also found time for a meditation session later in the day.

Hessler has spoken with her family — husband Curtiss, 42; son Peyton, 17; and daughters Kennedy 15, Sullivan, 13, and Veda, 7 — just three times since leaving them. “Friends are taking care of them,” she said.

Not everyone has supported her decision. “My mother told me I was being very selfish,” she admitted.

And her husband, a former Bank of America financial adviser who now works at a local Florida bank, is perplexed. “He says he’s working for ‘the Man,’ and I’m fighting against him,” she said.

After finishing her morning routine and afternoon chores yesterday, Hessler spent the evening attending organizer meetings and helping fellow protesters find sleeping spots.

Hessler herself bedded down on an air mattress at 12:28 a.m., ready to do it all over again today.

Additional reporting by Gillian Kleinman

Read

more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/she_plans_to_stray_awhile_opuo0dDOjE39dfRDdUZ1sM#ixzz1bR9NTK9C

Comments »

Libya’s new leaders will have to dig deep to find billions of dollars in cash and assets that Muammar Gaddafi and his family stashed around the world, and then will face daunting legal hurdles to recover them all, experts said on Friday.

About $19 billion in assets believed to have been under the control of Gaddafi or associates have been located and frozen by the United Nations and member countries, U.S. officials have said since rebel forces began fighting to oust him from power.

But other estimates suggest Gaddafi controlled as much as $30 billion in assets in the United States alone, plus large holdings in Europe and South Africa, said Victor Comras, a former money laundering expert for the United Nations and U.S. State Department.

“Gaddafi was no dummy,” Comras told Reuters. “The obvious and easy money, that held in Western banks and financial institutions, has largely already been located and blocked.”

Like other despots such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Democratic Republic of Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Gaddafi “likely also squirreled away large sums in assumed names or secret numbered accounts, or lockbox/deposit box stashes of currency, precious metals and marketable art and collectibles,” said Comras.

Other assets could include indirect holdings of shares and stakes in businesses and property held under assumed names or controlled by trusted associates.

FINANCIAL FORENSICS

“Finding this money will require very advanced financial forensics and it will still be quite difficult to locate,” Comras said.

John Christensen, former economic adviser to the tax haven of Jersey and now head of the Tax Justice Network, said assets could be hidden in trusts and front companies.

“When the actual person dies, the trustees often help themselves to the trust,” he said. “I’ve seen this happen in Jersey on a small scale and it happens on a large scale as well.”

Juan Zarate, a former White House and U.S. Treasury official who led the hunt for Saddam Hussein’s assets, said: “The recovery of assets is complicated not just by the hunt itself but by the difficulties with identifying and disentangling ownership interests.”

Recovery could ironically be aided by the fact that Gaddafi and his family regarded the Libyan state’s wealth and assets as their own, said Roger Tamraz, a Dubai-based financier who has had extensive dealings with Libya.

Seeing Libyan state wealth as their own, they kept most money or assets they held overseas in sovereign entities such as the Libyan Investment Fund, which would be easier for Gaddafi’s successors to recover than assets converted to personal use and then concealed, he said.

“When they were running the show, (the Gaddafis) didn’t feel they had (to distinguish) between what was government (wealth) and what was private,” Tamraz said.

FRAGILE BANKING SECTOR

Yet the NTC is moving cautiously in its efforts to recover overseas assets due to the fragility of the Libyan banking system, European and U.S. officials said.

Before they can haul in any assets, experts and officials said, the new authorities in Tripoli will have to establish government procedures and mechanisms for efficiently and accountably handling large amounts of recovered wealth.

The United Nations gave approval last month for the U.S. government to release $1.5 billion in frozen Libyan assets to Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC), but a U.S. official said Thursday that the NTC had asked for the release so far of only about $700 million of that amount.

European officials and private experts said there is no worldwide legal framework or treaty setting procedures for tracing, recovering and repatriating assets misappropriated or abused by deposed regimes.

“There is no single international legal regime,” so assets will have to be recovered country by country, said Jonathan Winer, a former U.S. State Department official.

Efforts to recover assets could be further complicated by legal claims, for example from victims of violence such as IRA bombings in Northern Ireland carried out with explosives allegedly supplied by Gaddafi, said Winer.

Dealing with such claims and recovering all assets acquired over Gaddafi’s 42-year reign is going to be an “unholy legal mess to sort out,” he said.

Bankers managing assets for Gaddafi and his family might “now act as if the assets belong to them,” particularly with those converted into personal holdings, said Comras.

“Some of these culprits may eventually be brought to justice. Others are likely to remain undiscovered,” Comras said.

SHARES IN JUVENTUS

Countries where Libyan sovereign assets deemed to have been under the control of Gaddafi or his family include the United States, Britain, Italy, Switzerland, Malta and several African nations.

A State Department cable made public by WikiLeaks said that, as of 2006, a Libyan government fund’s holdings in Italy included 2 percent of Fiat, 15 percent of Tamoil energy company, and 7.5 percent of soccer club Juventus where Gaddafi’s son Saadi once sat on the board. The cable said the fund, known as LFICO, also had over $500 million in investments in Britain.

Pearson, the British publishing giant which owns London’s Financial Times, announced in March that, under legal advice, it had frozen a 3.27 percent stake in its shares held by the Libyan Investment Authority.

“We are monitoring the situation closely,” a spokesman for Pearson said on Friday. “Once the relevant sanctions are lifted, Pearson will take the necessary steps to ensure that the shares and any dividends paid into a blocked account are unfrozen as soon as possible.”

Pearson, he said, “has long made it clear that it hopes these assets can be used for the benefit of the Libyan people as quickly as possible.”

(Additional reporting from Glenn Somerville and Andrew Quinn in Washington and Peter Apps in London; Editing by Roger Atwood)

SOURCE 

Comments »

Home for the holidays.

Comments »

FEED HERE

Comments »

SunTrust analyst William Chappell is literally pounding the table on Green Mountain Coffee (NASDAQ:GMCR) saying short seller David Einhorn is utterly wrong with his short thesis on the stock. Full Story here.

Comments »

DEVELOPING…

Comments »

No. Ticker % Change
1 CDTI 21.00
2 STX 20.36
3 SYNA 18.43
4 CYDE 18.18
5 NEXS 17.97
6 CDZI 15.68
7 ZLC 14.90
8 LPL 13.81
9 TPLM 13.71
10 DAC 13.04
11 GMR 12.00
12 HAR 11.69
13 ARTW 11.51
14 NBG 11.25
15 CWTR 10.99
16 FLEX 10.88
17 PGI 10.88
18 URZ 10.75
19 FEED 10.67
20 LYB 10.62
21 ALTR 10.60
22 EDMC 10.41
23 YRCW 10.00
24 MELI 9.84
25 AH 9.75
26 XXIA 9.66
27 SPMD 9.35
28 SYMX 9.21
29 HIMX 9.00
30 ATHX 8.89
31 CHMT 8.75
32 XG 8.71
33 SIVB 8.48
34 STVI 8.48
35 SPF 8.31
36 LIME 8.28
37 CETV 8.16
38 USG 8.10
39 VALV 8.05
40 HNR 7.80
41 ACTG 7.69
42 AVII 7.67
43 SCSS 7.62
44 TEN 7.62
45 SNDK 7.41
46 BWEN 7.41
47 GA 7.39
48 PHM 7.28
49 RYL 7.26
50 HDY 7.19
————————–

No. Ticker % Change
1 APKT -15.55
2 CALX -11.31
3 MTG -9.43
4 RSOL -9.28
5 DGLY -8.99
6 CPWR -8.14
7 FSL -7.86
8 KBX -7.30
9 MSHL -7.03
10 FACE -6.96
11 BGMD -6.89
12 ALTH -6.85
13 CPHD -6.85
14 KIPS -6.51
15 NGSX -6.42
16 CMM -6.40
17 CKH -6.38
18 SRT -6.32
19 OINK -6.21
20 PWAV -6.13
21 RRR -6.09
22 STI -6.09
23 LEXG.OB -6.04
24 UCFC -5.98
25 ADAT -5.97
26 QMM -5.88
27 CIIC -5.84
28 MBFI -5.54
29 ONSM -5.48
30 WEBM -5.45
31 KUTV -5.32
32 REDF -5.22
33 VTRO -5.15
34 XNY -5.00
35 IVAC -4.98
36 RDN -4.94
37 REFR -4.94
38 CRIC -4.90
39 CHC -4.90
40 TBSI -4.87
41 INFA -4.76
42 SCEI -4.59
43 VSCP -4.59
44 CTFO -4.53
45 PURE -4.35
46 MGH -4.35
47 XPL -4.27
48 BAS -4.26
49 BTFG -4.19
50 PULB -4.13

Comments »

Europe, Copper, Oil, Gold, Silver, Crazy, Banks, Tech. You name it, it’s up.

Comments »

In 1997 when Jobs became CEO of Apple again, Dell suggested Steve should “give the money back to the shareholders.” Jobs responded to Dell in an email, writing, “CEOs are supposed to have class […] I can see that isn’t an opinion you hold.”

Comments »