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IIF’s Dallara; Greek swap will be successful, high involvement

ATHENS (Reuters) – The chief negotiator for the body representing private sector holders of Greek bonds expressed confidence on Saturday that a bond swap deal which is a key part of Greece’s bailout program would be completed successfully next week.

“We can sense in our discussions with investors that momentum is building,” Charles Dallara, managing director of the International Institute of Finance (IIF), told Greece’s Antenna television in an interview.

“I’m quite optimistic that the participation levels will be quite high,” he said, but he declined to predict a figure.

Bondholders have until March 8 to sign up to the agreement under which they will exchange their existing Greek government bonds for new paper in a swap deal that will see the nominal value of their holdings cut by 53.5 percent.

Failure to secure a deal with private sector creditors would threaten the 130-billion-euro bailout package agreed last month with the European Central Bank, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Greece has said it would not be obliged to go through with the arrangement unless it gets 90 percent participation. If participation is below 90 percent but above 75 percent, it would consult with its public sector creditors.

Assuming a sufficient number of investors accept the deal, European leaders should give final approval to the bailout in a teleconference on March 9.

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Spain deficit challenges fiscal treaty

BRUSSELS (AP) — The leaders of 25 European countries on Friday signed a new treaty designed to limit government overspending, but their good intentions were immediately put to the test when Spain said it would miss deficit targets this year to spare itself from austerity overload.

By signing of the new treaty, known as the fiscal compact, the leaders hope to achieve closer political and economic integration and longer-term confidence in Europe’s finances. But the economic reality in the region — record unemployment and a slide back into recession — suggests the leaders need to reconsider their focus on austerity and seek ways to boost growth.

Hours after signing the new pact, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy admitted his government’s deficit will be 5.8 percent of economic output this year instead of the 4.4 percent earlier promised to the EU.

The EU’s executive, the European Commission, will be forced to either back off its demands for deficit cuts or sanction Madrid.

The clash illustrates the bind Europe’s leaders are in — having to reduce the debts that created the crisis in the first place while at the same time needing to foster economic growth, without which debt reduction measures will be futile.

“I did not consult other European leaders and I will inform the Commission in April,” Rajoy said. “This is a sovereign decision by Spain.”

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Prepare For the TSA on the Highways of America

This article made me sick…

Source

“By Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

One of the great honors of my service to Tennessee is having the opportunity to represent Ft. Campbell which is home to the storied 101st Airborne, the 5th Special Forces Group and the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment which piloted Navy SEAL Team Six during the raid on Osama Bin Laden.

Each soldier who calls Ft. Campbell home has gone through some of the most intensive training on the planet which pushed their minds and bodies to their physical limits. In the end, those who make the cut have earned the right to be part of our United States military, are honored to wear its uniform, and are serving on the frontlines in the fight against global terrorism.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for our nation’s Transportation Security Officers (TSO’s) who Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano contends are our nation’s last line of defense in fighting domestic terrorism. Unlike “hell week” which faces potential Navy SEALs, becoming a TSO requires a basic level of classroom and on the job training. In many cases this rigorous training is less severe than the requirements of becoming a security guard in most states.

Believe it or not, only 7 years ago, TSO’s went by a more deserving title, “airport security screeners.” At the time, their title and on the job appearance consisted of a white shirt and black pants. This was fitting because airport security screening is exactly what’s required of the position. However, this is no longer the case.

In the dead of night, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) administratively reclassified airport security screeners as Transportation Security Officers. The TSA then moved to administratively upgrade TSO’s uniforms to resemble those of a federal law enforcement officer. They further completed the makeover with metal law enforcement badges. Not surprisingly, government bureaucrats at the TSA left out one crucial component during the artificial makeover – actual federal law enforcement training as is required of Federal Air Marshalls.

While TSO’s may have the appearance of a federal law enforcement officer they have neither the authority nor the power. If a passenger brings a loaded gun or an explosive device into an airport screening area there is nothing a TSO can do until the local police step in to save the day.

If TSO’s are truly our nation’s last line of defense in stopping an act of terrorism, then the TSA should immediately end the practice of placing hiring notices for available TSO positions on pizza boxes and at discount gas stations as theyhave done in our nation’s capital. Surely, this is not where our federal government is going to find our brightest and sharpest Americans committed to keeping our traveling public safe. I would contend that we can surely strive for a higher standard and may want to look first to our veterans returning home from the battlefield.

Interestingly enough, as TSA officials like to routinely point out, their agency’s acronym stands for Transportation Security Administration, not the Airport SecurityAdministration. This fact has extended the TSA’s reach has far beyond the confines of our nation’s airports. Many of my constituents discovered this first hand this past fall as those familiar blue uniforms and badges appeared on Tennessee highways. In October Tennessee became the first state to conduct a statewide Department of Homeland Security Visible Intermodal Prevention andResponse (VIPR) team operation which randomly inspected Tennessee truck drivers and cars.

VIPR teams which count TSO’s among their ranks, conduct searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and every other mass transit location around the country. In fact, as the Los Angeles Times has detailed, VIPR teams conducted 9,300 unannounced checkpoints and other search operations in the last year alone. The very thought of federal employees with zero law enforcement training roaming across our nation’s transportation infrastructure with the hope of randomly thwarting a domestic terrorist attack makes about as much sense as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s Environmental Justice tour.

In order to help rein in the TSA I introduced H.R. 3608, the Stop TSA’s Reach in Policy Act aka the STRIP Act. This bill will simply overturn the TSA’s administrative decision by prohibiting any TSA employee who has not received federal law enforcement training from using the title “officer,” wearing a police like uniform or a metal police badge. At its most basic level the STRIP Act is about truth in advertising.

As TSO’s continue to expand their presence beyond our nation’s airports and onto our highways, every American citizen has the right to know that they are not dealing with actual federal law enforcement officers. Had one Virginia woman known this days before Thanksgiving she may have been able to escape being forcibly raped by a TSO who approached her in a parking lot in full uniform while flashing his badge.”

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SHOCK: 1 IN 8 CHANCE OF CATASTROPHIC SOLAR MEGASTORM BY 2020

via wired.com

The Earth has a roughly 12 percent chance of experiencing an enormous megaflare erupting from the sun in the next decade. This event could potentially cause trillions of dollars’ worth of damage and take up to a decade to recover from.

Such an extreme event is considered to be relatively rare. The last gigantic solar storm, known as the Carrington Event, occurred more than 150 years ago and was the most powerful such event in recorded history.

That a rival to this event might have a greater than 10 percent chance of happening in the next 10 years was surprising to space physicist Pete Riley, senior scientist at Predictive Science in San Diego, California, who published the estimate in Space Weather on Feb. 23.

“Even if it’s off by a factor of two, that’s a much larger number than I thought,” he said.

Earth’s sun goes through an 11-year cycle of increased and decreased activity. During solar maximum, it’s dotted with many sunspots and enormous magnetic whirlwinds erupt from its surface. Occasionally, these flares burst outward from the sun, spewing a mass of charged particles out into space.

 

Small solar flares happen quite often whereas very large ones are infrequent, a mathematical distribution known as a power law. Riley was able to estimate the chance of an enormous solar flare by looking at historical databases and calculating the relation between the size and occurrence of solar flares.

The biggest solar event ever seen was the Carrington Event, which occurred on Sept. 1, 1859. That morning, astronomer Richard Carrington watched an enormous solar flare erupt from the sun’s surface, emitting a particle stream at the Earth traveling more than 4 million miles per hour.

When they hit the Earth’s atmosphere, those particles generated the intense ghostly ribbons of light known as auroras. Though typically relegated to the most northerly and southerly parts of the planet, the atmospheric phenomenon reached as far as Cuba, Hawaii, and northern Chile. People in New York City gathered on sidewalks and rooftops to watch “the heavens … arrayed in a drapery more gorgeous than they have been for years,” as The New York Times described it.

 

‘It’s like being able to see a cyclone coming but not knowing the wind speed until it hits your boat 50 miles off the coast.’

Auroras may be beautiful, but the charged particles can wreak havoc on electrical systems. At the time of the Carrington Event, telegraph stations caught on fire, their networks experienced major outages and magnetic observatories recorded disturbances in the Earth’s field that were literally off the scale.

 

In today’s electrically dependent modern world, a similar scale solar storm could have catastrophic consequences. Auroras damage electrical power grids and may contribute to the erosion of oil and gas pipelines. They can disrupt GPS satellites and disturb or even completely black out radio communication on Earth.

During a geomagnetic storm in 1989, for instance, Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid collapsed within 90 seconds, leaving millions without power for up to nine hours.

The potential collateral damage in the U.S. of a Carrington-type solar storm might be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in the first year alone, with full recovery taking an estimated four to 10 years, according to a 2008 report from the National Research Council.

“A longer-term outage would likely include, for example, disruption of the transportation, communication, banking, and finance systems, and government services; the breakdown of the distribution of potable water owing to pump failure; and the loss of perishable foods and medications because of lack of refrigeration,” the NRC report said.

But such possibilities likely represent only the worst-case scenario, said Robert Rutledge, lead of the forecast office at the NOAA/National Weather Service Space Weather Prediction Center. The potential dangers might be significantly less, since power companies are aware of such problems and can take action to mitigate them.

For instance, companies may store power in areas where little damage is expected or bring on additional lines to help with power overloads. This is assuming, of course, that they are given enough warning as to the time and location of a solar storm’s impact on the Earth. Satellites relatively close to Earth are required to measure the exact strength and orientation of a storm.

“It’s like being able to see a cyclone coming but not knowing the wind speed until it hits your boat 50 miles off the coast,” Rutledge said.

Image: NASA

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FLASH: Game Over for First Solar

Despite a fugly quarterly report an analyst just reported that $FSLR has a core problem with their modules and that banks are refraining from loaning money to them. This was dubbed a game changer for the company and $0 is the price target…developing

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S&P Declares Greece in Default

BY STEPHEN L. BERNARD AND KATY BURNE

Greece became the first euro-zone member officially to be rated in default, 13 years after the single European currency was adopted to strengthen the European Union.

Standard & Poor’s cut Greece’s long-term credit rating to selective default from double-C. The move was expected, as S&P said this month that it would consider Greece in default if it added “collective-action” clauses to its sovereign debt, effectively forcing all bondholders to accept a bond-swap offering. ..

Read the rest here.

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Putin assassination plot foiled

Moscow (CNN) — A plot to assassinate Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been foiled, Russia’s state-run Channel One TV reported Monday, less than a week before presidential elections that Putin is expected to win.

Citing unnamed sources, the report said a group of plotters was arrested in the Ukrainian city of Odessa in early January and, after weeks of questioning, confessed to planning to kill the Russian leader.

The TV report included what it said was a confession by Adam Osmayev, a fixer associated with the two men who were seized in Odessa.

“Our final goal was to come to Moscow and try to organize an attempt on Prime Minister Putin,” Osmayev said.

Putin promises military spending He said the plan involved using military-grade land mines to blow up vehicles.

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Breaking: Afghani’s value paper more than people, violence continues

Shocking, I know, but maybe we’ve just stumbled onto the real reason why that section of the world is such a gargantuan pile of shit.

KABUL, Afghanistan – A suicide car bomber rammed his vehicle into the gates of a NATO base and airport in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, triggering a blast that killed nine Afghans, officials said. The Taliban claimed the attack was revenge for U.S. troops burning copies of the Koran.

The bombing in the city of Jalalabad follows six days of deadly protests in the country over the disposal of Korans and other Islamic texts in a burn pit last week at a U.S. military base north of Kabul.

American officials have called the disposal of the books a mistake and have issued a series of apologies. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has urged calm, calling on his countrymen not to allow insurgents to capitalize on their indignation to spark violence.

About 40 people have been killed in protests and related attacks since the incident became known this past Tuesday, including four U.S. soldiers. NATO, France, Britain and the U.S. have pulled their advisers from Afghan ministries out of concern that the anti-foreigner anger might erupt again.

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George Osborne: The U.K. Government ‘has run out of money’ and cannot afford debt-fuelled tax cuts or extra spending

“In a stark warning ahead of next month’s Budget, the Chancellor said there was little the Coalition could do to stimulate the economy.

Mr Osborne made it clear that due to the parlous state of the public finances the best hope for economic growth was to encourage businesses to flourish and hire more workers.

“The British Government has run out of money because all the money was spent in the good years,” the Chancellor said. “The money and the investment and the jobs need to come from the private sector.”

Read more

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