Germany, France Near 2 Billion Euro Rescue Fund Deal: Report
Germany, France Near 2 Billion Euro Rescue Fund Deal: Report
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy leave after giving a statement on October 9, 2011 at the Chancellery in Berlin following a key summit on steps to combat debt turbulence in the Eurozone. Germany and France are nearing a deal to boost the Eurozone bailout fund to $2 billion, according to a report.
France and Germany have agreed to boost a euro zone financial rescue fund to two trillion euros ($2.76 trillion), part of a plan to resolve the bloc's debt crisis that should win support at Sunday's EU crisis summit, Britain's Guardian newspaper said on Tuesday.
The paper, citing senior European Union diplomats, said the euro zone will endorse a five-fold increase in the 440-billion-euro bailout fund, giving it some two trillion euros to help troubled governments and banks survive should Greece or any other troubled euro zone country default.
The paper said confidence that the plan would be approved at the summit was on the rise after Moody's warned it might put France's top AAA credit rating on review, citing the cost of bailing out troubled banks or other members of the euro zone.
A senior euro zone source, however, told Reuters there had been no mention of such a deal.
Earlier, German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that leaders would not solve the debt crisis at one summit meeting.
U.S. stocks and the euro rose on the report, though traders said they were taking a wait-and-see approach.
If true, the news ""would be what the market's been looking for, and two trillion seems to be in the right neighborhood," said Brian Dolan, chief strategist at Forex.com in Bedminster, New Jersey,
But, he added, "I have to take it with a grain of salt. We've seen a lot of these European reports that something was imminent only to be disappointed the next morning."
Markets have been on edge for fear European leaders would not agree on a plan to address the crisis, which has already forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal to seek bailouts and has driven up borrowing costs in Italy and Spain.
European banks with heavy exposure to troubled sovereign debt have also found it harder to fund operations, sparking fear that governments may have to bail them out.
According to the Guardian report, France and Germany agreed that Europe's banks should be recapitalized to meet the 9 percent ratio the European Bank Authority is demanding after having examined the exposure levels of between 60 and 70 "systemic" banks.
While French and German banks are said capable of meeting the new capital ratio on their own, other countries' banks may need help from the state or the expanded bailout fund, known as the European Financial Stability Fund, the paper reported.
Berlin and Paris are also said to be closer to agreement on increasing private sector involvement in a second 109-billion-euro rescue for Greece. The voluntary "haircut" for bond holders was set at 21 percent in July but worsening financial conditions have spurred Germany to push for private creditor losses of up to 50 percent.
Greece Braces For 'Mother Of All Strikes' As Austerity Vote Nears
ATHENS - Harry Papachristou and James Mackenzie) - Greek ships were harboured and garbage rotted in the streets of Athens on Tuesday as angry workers built momentum for "the mother of all strikes" expected to bring the country to a halt in protest against a new package of tax hikes and wage cuts.
Unions representing around half of Greece's 4 million-strong workforce have called a 48 hour general strike for Wednesday and Thursday to protest against a sweeping package of austerity measures due to be passed in parliament this week.
A wave of smaller strikes over recent days by groups ranging from rubbish collectors to tax officials, journalists and seamen has given a foretaste of this week's protest which will culminate in mass demonstrations in front of parliament, the scene of violent clashes in June.
The protest, dubbed "the mother of all strikes" by the daily Ta Nea newspaper, is expected to be the biggest since the financial crisis began two years ago, shutting state offices, shops and even providers of everyday staples like bakers.
Prime Minister George Papandreou, battling to satisfy demands from international lenders for even tougher action, has appealed for unity, saying the package, due to be passed on Wednesday or Thursday, must pass to allow Greece to emerge from the crisis.
"The nation is at a crucial moment and we have to be united. In this battle, we need everyone," Papandreou told a cabinet meeting late on Monday. "Everyone must assume their responsibilities."
"Our main goal is to end the uncertainty over the country's future. Because this uncertainty undermines our efforts and sacrifices," he said.
His struggling Socialist government, trailing badly in the opinion polls, is being squeezed between the escalating street protests and pressure from lenders dissatisfied with the pace of reform.
As European Union leaders race to put the foundations of a new rescue plan in place in time for a summit on Oct. 23, there was growing talk of more direct intervention that would restrict Greek sovereignty in return for more aid.
Some euro zone countries have been pressing for a European Commission taskforce to be given direct powers to intervene in areas such as overseeing the sale of state assets.
The Greek government declined to comment on Tuesday but any outside taskforce would need to be ready to counter resistance from a society deeply disillusioned with its own political leaders but also increasingly hostile to outside intervention.
RECESSION
Late on Monday, Papandreou suffered a blow when PASOK deputy Thomas Robopoulos resigned in protest at the cuts, although parliamentary rules allow him to be replaced by another member of the ruling party, leaving the government's 4-seat majority intact.
Two other PASOK deputies have also threatened to vote against part of the package but, with one of the smaller opposition parties possibly offering support, the package is still expected to pass.
The bill includes tax hikes, wage cuts, public sector layoffs and changes to collective bargaining rules.
It follows a series of painful austerity measures that have so far failed to halt a steady rise in Greece's mountainous public debt and have been attacked by the opposition for stifling any prospect of growth in the stricken economy.
Trapped in deep recession for the past three years, Greece is choking on a public debt that amounts to around 162 percent of gross domestic product and there are growing doubts that it will be able to emerge from the crisis without defaulting.
Underlining the problems facing an economy that is already forecast to contract 5.5 percent in 2011, data on Tuesday showed headline unemployment rising to 16.5 percent in July, a month when summer tourism normally boosts job numbers. Youth unemployment was running as high as 42 percent.
An EU and IMF inspection team left Athens last week, recommending approval of a vital 8 billion euro loan tranche but said Greece was falling behind on its budget targets and should move more quickly to cut spending and pass reforms.
Parliament is due to open a three-day debate later on Tuesday, after Papandreou meets members of the ruling PASOK parliamentary group to rally support.
He wants convincing backing for the measures in time for the EU summit and is due to meet conservative opposition leader Antonis Samaras in a bid to present a united front in Brussels.
However government officials have dismissed rumours that Papandreou might renew an offer for a coalition government, which Samaras turned down in the summer.
Sweden: 23 Women Convicted Of Child Pornography
Sweden: 23 Women Convicted Of Child Pornography
STOCKHOLM — A Swedish court on Tuesday convicted 23 women and one man of child pornography offenses in what investigators called a unique case because of the number of female perpetrators.
The Falu District Court gave the women, aged between 38 and 70, conditional sentences and fines ranging from 2,500 to 18,000 Swedish kronor ($380 to $2,700). It also sentenced a 43-year-old man to one year in prison for aggravated child pornography.
The court said the women received scores of sexually explicit video clips and photographs of children from the man and discussed them online with him. Some said they liked the images or shared sexual fantasies about the children, and one woman sent pornographic images of children to the man, the court said.
The material showed girls and boys of various ages, from toddlers to teenagers.
The man made contact with the women on the Internet and had sexual relations with about half of them, but they had no connection to each other, the court said.
Some 1,181 pictures and 40 films with child pornography were found in the man's computer, including brutal images of shackled children being raped by adults.
Swedish police said reactions they have received from Interpol indicate this is the first child pornography case worldwide to involve so many women.
The court noted that the man appeared to be seeking out women that had been "struck by tragedies within the family, or had been generally mentally worn out."
"Even though they (the women) ... obviously must take full responsibility for their actions, nothing else can be said than that he has abused their weak psychological state and longing for human contact. This has been systematical," the court said.
It added that the majority of the women would probably not have looked at child pornography had they not been introduced to it by the man.
The man confessed to committing a child pornography offense of the lower degree but denied aggravated crime.
A 39-year-old woman denied any involvement, claiming someone else must have used her computer, while five of the women confessed. The others admitted they had received the files, but denied criminal guilt, saying they weren't aware of what kind of files they had received or had suffered memory loss.
In Sweden, defendants in such cases are not named by the nation's media.
Lawyer Staffan Uvabeck, who represents the 39-year-old woman, says he assumes his client wants to appeal.
"She has denied that she used her computer for this," he said. "Since this happened a very long time ago, five years ago, we believe there is room for other interpretations of what has happened."
Lawyers of other defendants didn't immediately return calls seeking a comment.
Malin Rising can be reached at http://twitter.com/malinrising
TX Students Made to Recite Mexico’s National Anthem and Pledge Mexican Allegiance
Students in a Texas public high school were made to stand up and recite the Mexican national anthem and Mexican pledge of allegiance as part of a Spanish class assignment, but the school district maintains there was nothing wrong with the lesson.
It happened last month in an intermediate Spanish class at Achieve Early College High School in McAllen, Texas — a city located about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.
Wearing red, white and green, students had to memorize the Mexican anthem and pledge and stand up and recite them in individually in front of the class.
That didn’t go over well with sophomore Brenda Brinsdon. The 15-year-old sat down and refused to participate. She also caught it all on video:
World Occupy Protests and Communist Surge to Take Over the Movement
World Occupy Protests and Communist Surge to Take Over the Movement
In watching the dedication of the MLK Jr. Monument, coupled with footage of the Occupy protests around the world, I finally heard the magic buzz words. What started out as a patriotic uprising in the United States was yesterday called “A Leftist World Revolution.” No sale, propagandist. This last ditch effort has already failed.
Many months ago I wrote of the intensions of the international corporate mafia. We the people had made it clear through the grassroots Tea Party movement that the foreign insurgent Obama was not going to usher social communism into our country. The plan to deprive our people and then offer the “Obama Socialist Revolution” as a solution did not go quite as planned.
You see it was a simple plan. Our jobs were to be taken, our homes and retirement, and then someone, like Michael Moore, was supposed to step up and declare that we were at war with the capitalists. There would be riots in the streets and the workers would come together under communism, take over the factories, strike down the Constitution through soviet committees within our government, and start building statues of Karl Marx.Just one problem, they chose the wrong generation to dispossess, disenfranchise, and make civilly dead in an effort to sell them communism. They chose the baby boomer generation because we had the most wealth to steal, which was a side benefit in connection to their actions. But they missed one little aspect in reference to timing.
We baby boomers we raised during the Cold War and as a part of the government indoctrination centers we went to, we were taught to hate communism to facilitate $5.5 trillion in defense spending to procure our nuclear arsenal for the sole purpose of stopping the Red Menace. (Remember “Kill a Commie for Mommy” and “Better Dead than Red”?)
And how did they teach us to hate communists and communism? Well they had to do something that was a little distasteful to them, but as $5.5 trillion was involved, they did it anyway. They taught us the Constitution and showed us, using undeniable facts how communism, if allowed to spread, would destroy our Republic and our way of life. And now, right in the midst of their “Leftist Revolution” the communists are finding themselves grossly outnumbered by the baby boomer patriots, who literally hate their guts and livers.
They have made their final push in timing the dedication of the MLK Jr. Monument with the world wide protests, and quite frankly the American people of the American race are being turned off by their blatant display.
It is really funny if you think about it, when you find out they actually did the whole thing on the cheap. So how did we Americans memorialize the great American Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? With a hunk of granite imported from China and sculpted using Chinese labor, followed by Al Sharpton preaching a mix of the Constitution and Marxism.
Marxism is not only an oxymoronic theology to our Constitution, but has to be considered repugnant to our Constitution. I am sick of hearing Martin Luther King’s movement for equality called the Civil Rights Movement, when in reality what actually occurred was an enforcement of our beloved Constitution, as the whole problem of racism was in reality due to a failure to enforce our Constitution.
Now as we unite as the American people of the American race for the reinstitution of our Republic under our Constitution, our enemies are trying to use a diversity that we have put in our past to hijack our patriotic revolution with a Marxist movement for civil rights in a social communistic society, designed to reduce us to a soviet state in the one world communist union.
When Sharpton took the stage and started calling for we the people to fall in step with the treasonous foreign insurgent Obama in supporting his fraudulent jobs bill, which in reality is designed to give his corporate masters $800,000 a pop to provide us with a $30,000 a year job, the intent became clear. Obama is an international communist traitor and anyone who advocates for or supports Obama is a traitor.
It has been the hope and dream of the international elite to divide we the people into opposing camps so that we might kill each other for them. It is not going to work. We will take our Republic back under our Constitution, after which our military, backed by 40 million militia will drive the communists into the sea. And if you commies out there want to push the issue before hand, and Americans must kill Americans, then so be it. 40 million militia will kill every goddamn communist in the process of taking back the Republic. You cannot and you will not win. The giant is awake and the giant hates communists.
God bless this Republic, death to the international corporate mafia, we shall prevail.
Communist Party U.S.A. in Solidarity with Occupy Protests
Communist Party U.S.A. in Solidarity with Occupy Chicago
Communist Party marches in solidarity with Occupy Chicago. Occupy Chicago gives them a warm reception.
See more at www.youtube.com
Big Banks Refuse to Let People Close Accounts
Washington’s Blog
October 17, 2011
The Occupy Wall Street protesters have announced that November 5th is “Bank Transfer Day”, a targeted day to “Move Your Money”.
The big banks are trying to preempt the efforts of their customers to move their money to smaller banks.
This week, protesters were arrested when they tried to close their Citibank accounts:
And a Bank of American branch in Santa Cruz refused to let protesters close their accounts, saying they could not be protesters and customers at the same time:
In August, Bank of America used police (and reportedly swat teams) to stop St. Louis Bank of America customers from closing their accounts:
See more at www.prisonplanet.com
Questions linger over why CIA operative is at NYPD
The CIA is prohibited from spying domestically, and its unusual partnership with the NYPD has troubled top lawmakers and prompted an internal investigation.
Questions linger over why CIA operative is at NYPD
By ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Working inside the New York Police Department is one of the CIA's most experienced clandestine operatives. He arrived in July as the special assistant to the deputy commissioner of intelligence. While his title is clear, his job responsibilities are not.
Federal and city officials have offered differing explanations for why this top CIA officer was assigned to a municipal police department since The Associated Press revealed the assignment in August. The CIA is prohibited from spying domestically, and its unusual partnership with the NYPD has troubled top lawmakers and prompted an internal investigation.
The last time a CIA officer worked so closely with the NYPD, beginning in the months after the 9/11 attacks, he became the architect of aggressive police programs that monitored Muslim neighborhoods. With that earlier help from this CIA official, the police put entire communities under a microscope based on ethnicity rather allegations of wrongdoing, according to the AP investigation.
It was an extraordinary collaboration that at times troubled some senior CIA officials and may have stretched the bounds of how the CIA is allowed to operate in the United States.
The arrangement surrounding the newly arrived CIA officer, who was at the center of one of the worst U.S. intelligence fiascos in recent history, has been portrayed differently from that of his predecessor. When first asked by the AP, a senior U.S. official described the posting as a sabbatical, a program aimed at giving the man in New York more management training.
Testifying at City Hall recently, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the CIA operative provides his officers "with information, usually coming from perhaps overseas." He said the CIA operative provides "technical information" to the NYPD but "doesn't have access to any of our investigative files."
CIA Director David Petraeus has described him as an adviser, someone who could ensure that information was being shared.
But the CIA already has someone with that job. At its large station in New York, a CIA liaison shares intelligence with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, which has hundreds of NYPD detectives assigned to it. And the CIA did not explain how, if the adviser doesn't have access to NYPD files, he's getting management experience in a division built entirely around collecting domestic intelligence.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, mischaracterized him to Congress as an "embedded analyst" - his office later quietly said that was a mistake - and acknowledged it looked bad to have the CIA working so closely with a police department.
All of this has troubled lawmakers, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has said the CIA has "no business or authority in domestic spying, or in advising the NYPD how to conduct local surveillance."
"It's really important to fully understand what the nature of the investigations into the Muslim community are all about, and also the partnership between the local police and the CIA," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
Still, the undercover operative remains in New York while the agency's inspector general investigates the CIA's decade-long relationship with the NYPD. The CIA has asked the AP not to identify him because he remains a member of the clandestine service and his identity is classified.
The CIA's deep ties to the NYPD began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when CIA Director George Tenet dispatched a veteran officer, Larry Sanchez, to New York, where he became the architect of the police department's secret spying programs.
While still on the agency payroll, Sanchez, a CIA veteran who spent 15 years overseas in the former Soviet Union, South Asia, and the Middle East, instructed officers on the art of collecting information without attracting attention. He directed officers and reviewed case files.
Sometimes, officials said, intelligence collected from NYPD's operations was passed informally to the CIA.
Sanchez also hand-picked an NYPD detective to attend the "Farm," the CIA's training facility where its officers are turned into operatives. The detective, who completed the course but failed to graduate, returned to the police department where he works today armed with the agency's famed espionage skills.
Also while under Sanchez's direction, documents indicate, the NYPD's Cyber Intelligence Unit, which monitors domestic and foreign websites, conducted training sessions for the CIA.
Sanchez was on the CIA payroll from 2002 to 2004, then took a temporary leave of absence to become deputy to David Cohen, a former senior CIA officer who became head of the NYPD intelligence division just months after the 9/11 attacks.
In 2007, the CIA's top official in New York complained to headquarters that Sanchez was wearing two hats, sometimes operating as an NYPD official, sometimes as a CIA officer. At headquarters, senior officials agreed and told Sanchez he had to choose.
He formally left the CIA, staying on at the NYPD until late 2010. He now works as a security consultant in the Persian Gulf region.
Sanchez's departure left Cohen scrambling to find someone with operational experience who could replace him. He approached several former CIA colleagues about taking the job but they turned him down, according to people familiar with the situation who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the department's inner workings.
Cohen then persuaded the CIA to send the current operative to be his assistant.
He arrived with an impressive post-9/11 resume. He had been the station chief in Pakistan and then Jordan, two stations that served as focal points in the war on terror, according to current and former officials who worked with him. He also was in charge of the agency's Counter Proliferation Division.
But he is no stranger to controversy. Former U.S. intelligence officials said he was nearly expelled from Pakistan after an incident during President George W. Bush's first term. Pakistan became enraged after sharing intelligence with the U.S. only to learn that the CIA station chief passed the information to the British.
Then, while serving in Amman, the station chief was directly involved in an operation to kill al-Qaida's then-No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri. But the plan backfired badly. The key informant who promised to lead the CIA to al-Zawahiri was in fact a double agent working for al-Qaida.
At least one CIA officer saw problems in the case and warned the station chief but, as recounted in a new book "The Triple Agent" by Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick, the station chief decided to push ahead anyway.
The informant blew himself up at a remote CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, in December 2009. He killed seven CIA employees, including the officer who had warned the station chief, and wounded six others. Leon Panetta, the CIA director at the time, called it a systemic failure and decided no one person was at fault.
Contact the Washington investigative team at DCInvestigations(at)ap.org
Read AP's previous stories and documents about the NYPD at: http://www.ap.org/nypd
Follow Goldman and Apuzzo at http://twitter.com/goldmandc and http://twitter.com/mattapuzzo