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Monday, September 8, 2008 |
TheAge: "A high-ranking Chinese economist has put his nation's cards on the table in the global financial poker game by effectively telling the US to fix Freddie and Fannie ... or else.
'A failure of US mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could be a catastrophe for the global financial system,' Yu Yongding, a former adviser to China's central bank, says.
'If the US government allows Fannie and Freddie to fail and international investors are not compensated adequately, the consequences will be catastrophic,' Yu said in e-mailed answers to Bloomberg. 'If it is not the end of the world, it is the end of the current international financial system.'
It is well within the bounds of imagination. People have been thinking the unthinkable for some time."
And America listened to the Chinese:
SFGate: "The federal government took control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Sunday in a bid to keep the two mortgage giants from failing, catastrophes that would have made home loans harder to get and taken the nation's housing collapse to a new level of crisis.
The government agreed to pump billions of dollars into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and assume responsibility for trillions of dollars of their debt, while handing control of the companies to federal regulators."
11:37:17 AM 
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Telegraph: "An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph found that three quarters of local authorities have used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 over the past year.
The Act gives councils the right to place residents and businesses under surveillance, trace telephone and email accounts and even send staff on undercover missions.
The findings alarmed civil liberties campaigners. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: 'Councils do a grave disservice to professional policing by using serious surveillance against litterbugs instead of terrorists.'
The RIPA was introduced to help fight terrorism and crime. But a series of extensions, first authorised by David Blunkett in 2003, mean that Britain's 474 councils can use the law to tackle minor misdemeanours."
11:28:04 AM
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EFF: "Over a period of twelve hours, between this Thursday night and Friday morning, American Rights Counsel LLC sent out over 4000 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube, all making copyright infringement claims against videos with content critical of the Church of Scientology. Clips included footage of Australian and German news reports about Scientology, A Message to Anonymous/Scientology, and footage from a Clearwater City Commission meeting. Many accounts were suspended by YouTube in response to multiple allegations of copyright infringement.
YouTube users responded with DMCA counter-notices. At this time, many of the suspended channels have been reinstated and many of the videos are back up. Whether or not American Rights Counsel, LLC represents the notoriously litigious Church of Scientology is unclear, but this would not be the first time that the Church of Scientology has used the DMCA to silence Scientology critics. The Church of Scientology DMCA complaints shut down the YouTube channel of critic Mark Bunker in June, 2008. Bunker's account, XenuTV, was also among the channels shut down in this latest flurry of takedown notices."
Scientology claims they are a church, but that is only for tax purposes.
Justice Anderson, Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia: "Scientology is evil; its techniques are evil; its practice is a serious threat to the community, medically, morally, and socially; and its adherents are sadly deluded and often mentally ill... (Scientology is) the world's largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy."
DMCA abuse by scientology.
BBC: "The Church of Scientology in France will be tried in court for 'organised fraud', according to legal sources.
The lawyer for one of the plaintiffs behind the case told the BBC that if convicted the controversial Church could be banned."
11:21:24 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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