Catherine Ashton, the EU's recently-appointed foreign policy chief, will be able to trim her busy work schedule and counter criticism of her lack of visibility thanks to the assistance of three EU commissioners, who will act as her deputies.

Štefan Füle, the Czech commissioner for enlargement, Andris Piebalgs, his Latvian colleague responsible for development, and Kristalina Georgieva, the Bulgarian commissioner for humanitarian aid, will all assist Ashton, a Commission official said.

Catherine Ashton has endured attacks from several quarters, including French ministers, for not flying the EU flag at hotspots such as earthquake-hit Haiti or being unable to attend European gatherings.

Sixty-nine suspected Georgian mafia members have been arrested in a co-ordinated operation across Europe.

Twenty-four of them were detained in Spain, mainly in Barcelona and Valencia, as part of Operation Java, Spanish police said.

The arrests are the result of a year-long investigation initiated by Spanish police.

The other arrests took place in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy.

Catherine Ashton, the European Union's new high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, has kicked off her first official trip to the Middle East with tough talk for Israel.

Addressing members of the Arab League in Cairo on Monday, Ashton voiced her disapproval of Israel's decision last week to approve the construction of 1,600 new homes in West Bank settlements, just two days after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had reluctantly agreed to begin indirect peace talks. Those talks have since been put on the backburner.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine AshtonBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Ashton's speech in Cairo was seen a major test for the EU's new foreign policy chief

She said the move "endangered and undermined the tentative agreement to begin proximity talks."

A Dutch political party formed by self-described pedophiles has voted to disband itself after failing for the second time to participate in national elections in June.

The group, which sought to lower the age of sexual consent to 12, says it could not get the 600 signatures necessary to win a place on the ballot in a country of 16.5 million. It would need 60,000 votes to win a seat in the 150-member Dutch parliament.

Amid record voter apathy, France's Socialist Party have triumphed over the ruling right-wing UMP party in regional elections. The far-right National Front made significant headway while the centrist MoDem party suffered a spectacular defeat.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party won in the eight regions that held elections in Russia on Sunday with between 43 and 70 percent of the votes cast. But it saw support fall by between nine and 24 percentage points in six regional parliaments compared to national election results in 2007, when it scored a landslide victory.

Opposition parties said the elections were marred by widespread voting violations and complained that President Dmitry Medvedev had failed to follow through on a pledge for free and fair elections.

Cooked meat manufacturer Forza AW, a major supplier of the Asda supermarket chain, has turned down British workers for factory jobs because they don't speak Polish, it's claimed.

The government's equality watchdog says it plans to contact the firm regarding allegations of discrimination against British jobseekers.

An emailed advert for factory work on Forza's East Anglia production line, sent out via employment agency OSR Recruitment this month, reads: ''Immediate factory work available!!!!

"If you are available or have any friends available, work is starting tomorrow for induction training.

''Transport provided. Applicants must speak Polish. Please call asap!!!!!!''

The Spanish EU Presidency is aiming to close an agreement on the draft hedge and private equity funds directive at a meeting of finance ministers in Brussels tomorrow (16 March), with teething problems on foreign fund treatment threatening to derail a deal.

The UK is pushing for EU-wide recognition of hedge funds that have won approval on its territory.

But such an agreement appears unattainable at the moment as Britain and France continue to hold opposing views on the proposed Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD).

[...]

The UK is alone in making such demands and will be overruled by other member states if necessary, the diplomat indicated.

"All members [of the EU's Council of Ministers] are against. The United Kingdom is isolated on this issue. When you are alone, at one point or another you have to recognise it."

Greece told to ensure 'solid austerity plan'
By Contant Brand
15.03.2010 / 18:24 CET
Dutch finance minister says there will be intervention, but no bail-out of Greece.

The Netherlands today warned Greece at a meeting of eurozone finance ministers not to expect "a free ride to cheap loans" as part of any EU co-ordinated measures to help it out of its financial woes.

Dutch Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager said that Greece had "to ensure a solid austerity plan" before any other aid is offered by the other members of the eurozone.

"It's possible we will take measures in a co-ordinated way...but there will be no bail-out, because a bail-out is also forbidden in the [EU's] treaty," de Jager said.

Timmy-Gate Takes a Turn For The Worse: Did Geithner Help Lehman Hide Accounting Tricks?

Just when you thought that nothing could stink more than Timothy Geithner's handling of the AIG bailout, a new report details how Geithner's New York Fed allowed Lehman Brothers to use an accounting gimmick to hide debt. The report, which runs to 2200 pages, was released by Anton Valukas, the court-appointed examiner. It actually makes the AIG bailout look tame by comparison. It is now crystal clear why Geithner's Treasury as well as Bernanke's Fed refuse to allow any light to shine on the massive cover-up underway.

Recall that the New York Fed arranged for AIG to pay one hundred cents on the dollar on bad debts to its counterparties--benefiting Goldman Sachs and a handful of other favored Wall Street firms. (see here) The purported reason is that Geithner so feared any negative repercussions resulting from debt write-downs that he wanted Uncle Sam to make sure that Wall Street banks could not lose on bad bets. Now we find that Geithner's NYFed supported Lehman's efforts to conceal the extent of its problems. (see here) Not only did the NYFed fail to blow the whistle on flagrant accounting tricks, it also helped to hide Lehman's illiquid assets on the Fed's balance sheet to make its position look better. Note that the NY Fed had increased its supervision to the point that it was going over Lehman's books daily; further, it continued to take trash off the books of Lehman right up to the bitter end, helping to perpetuate the fraud that was designed to maintain the pretense that Lehman was not massively insolvent.

Wray cites a NYT article on the subject of the Fed's involvement in hiding the insolvency:

They were considered the dregs of Lehman Brothers -- "bottom of the barrel," as one banker put it. But as Lehman executives tried to keep the floundering bank afloat in 2008, they used these troubled investments to raise quick cash that helped mask the extent of the firm's troubles. And they did it with the help of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The newly released report on the collapse of Lehman Brothers -- which lays out what it characterizes as "materially misleading" accounting at the bank -- also sheds surprising new light on Lehman's dealings with the New York Fed.

Lehman engaged in a series of transactions with the New York Fed that were similar to the ones that drew criticism from the bankruptcy court examiner who investigated its collapse. The examiner, Anton R. Valukas, drew no conclusions about the transactions with the Fed, and focused instead on deals that were known inside Lehman as "Repo 105."

But the report by Mr. Valukas nonetheless raises fresh questions about the role of the New York Fed in supporting Lehman during the frantic months leading up to its collapse. It suggests that Lehman executives believed the Fed would be able to help the bank avert disaster and provide it with a business opportunity.

Geithner told Congress that he has never been a regulator. (see here) That is a quite honest assessment of his job performance, although it is completely inaccurate as a description of his duties as President of the NYFed. Apparently, Geithner has never met an accounting gimmick that he does not like, if it appears to improve the reported finances of a Wall Street firm. We will leave to the side his own checkered past as a taxpayer, although one might question the wisdom of appointing someone who is apparently insufficiently skilled to file accurate tax returns to a position as our nation's chief tax collector. What is far more troubling is that he now heads the Treaury--which means that he is not only responsible for managing two regulatory units (the FDIC and OCC), but also that he has got hold of the government's purse strings. How many more billions or trillions will he commit to a futile effort to help Wall Street avoid its losses?

Geithner has denied that he played any direct role in the AIG bail-out--a somewhat implausible claim given that he was the President of the NYFed and given that this was a monumental and unprecedented action to funnel government funds to AIG's counterparties. He may try to deny involvement in the Lehman deals. (Again, this is implausible. Lehman executives claimed they "gave full and complete financial information to government agencies", and that the government never raised significant objections or directed that Lehman take any corrective action. In fairness, the SEC also overlooked any problems at Lehman. (see here) But here is what is so astounding about the gimmicks: Lehman used "Repo 105" to temporarily move liabilities off its balance sheet--essentially pretending to sell them although it promised to immediately buy them back. The abuse was so flagrant that no US law firm would sign off on the practice, fearing that creditors and stockholders would have grounds for lawsuits on the basis that this caused a "material misrepresentation" of Lehman's financial statements. (see here) The court-appointed examiner hired to look into the failure of Lehman found "materially misleading" accounting and "actionable balance sheet manipulation." (here) But just as Arthur Andersen had signed off on Enron's scams, Ernst & Young found no problem with Lehman. (here)

In short, this was an Enron-style, go directly to jail and do not pass go, sort of fraud. Lehman's had been using this trick since 2001. (here) It looked fine to Timmy's Fed, which extended loans allowing Lehman to flip bad assets onto the Fed's balance sheet to keep the fraud going.

More generally, this revelation drives home three related points. First, the scandal is on-going and it is huge. President Obama must hold Geithner accountable. He must determine what did Geithner know, and when did he know it. All internal documents and emails related to the AIG bailout and the attempt to keep Lehman afloat need to be released. Further, Obama must ask what has Geithner done to favor his clients on Wall Street? It now looks like even the Fed BOG, not just the NYFed, is involved in the cover-up. It is in the interest of the Obama administration to come clean. It is hard to believe that it does not already have sufficient cause to fire Geithner. In terms of dollar costs to the government, this is surely the biggest scandal in US history. It terms of sheer sleaze does it rank with Watergate? I suppose that depends on whether you believe that political hit lists and spying that had no real impact on the outcome of an election is as bad as a wholesale handing-over of government and the economy to Wall Street.

At least Senator Kaufman, who took Joe Biden's seat, has spoken out on this outrage. But the Republicans are hoping to win back Wall Street's favor, so they are keeping quiet about this massive ongoing fraud, and, of course, the Obama White House, who received the most money ever for a presidential campaign from Wall Street, is demonstrating to Wall Street just what their largess has purchased. From HuPo, who picked up Simon Johnson's article in Baseline Scenario:

Last week, Senator Ted Kaufman (D., DE) gave a devastating speech in the Senate on "too big to fail" and all it entails. A long public silence from our political class was broken -- and to great effect. Today's Dodd reform proposals stand in pale comparison to the principles outlined by Senator Kaufman. And yes, DE stands for Delaware -- corporate America has finally decided that its largest financial offspring are way out of line and must be reined in.

Now, the Senator has gone one better, putting many private criticisms of the financial sector -- the kind you hear whispered with conviction on the Upper East Side and in Midtown -- firmly and articulately on the public record in a Senate floor speech to be delivered tomorrow (this is a direct link to speech). He pulls no punches:
   

"fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis"

He goes after Lehman -- with its infamous Repo 105 -- as well as the other entities potentially implicated in those transactions, including Ernst and Young (Lehman's auditors). This is the low hanging fruit -- but have you heard even a squeak from the White House or anyone else in the country's putative leadership on this issue?

And then he goes for the twin jugulars of Wall Street as it still stands: The idea that we saved something, at great expense in 2008-09, that was actually worth saving; and Goldman Sachs.
   

"[T]his is not about retribution. This is about addressing the continuum of behavior that took place -- some of it fraudulent and illegal -- and in the process addressing what Wall Street and the legal and regulatory system underlying its behavior have become."

(Everywhere a "(here)" appears in Wray's text there is a link that I did not incorporate. It is way past my bedtime.)

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

FREMONT, Calif. (AP) -- The United Auto Workers union has reached a tentative agreement to shut down California's sole remaining auto plant which employs 4,600 people....

Nummi, which stands for New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., began 25 years ago as a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors Co. The goal was to let GM observe the Japanese car-making system and let Toyota test out its production model on U.S. workers....

Toyota plans to move production of the Corolla to Canada and Japan and the Tacoma to Texas.

Read more...

"If these programs keep growing, you're going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can't find meaningful employment," said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. "They can't generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they're going to end up in financial distress."...

The administration is also tightening regulations to ensure that vocational schools that receive aid dollars prepare students for "gainful employment." Under a proposal being floated by the Department of Education, programs would be barred from loading students with more debt than justified by the likely salaries of the jobs they would pursue.

"During a recession, with increased demand for education and more anxiety about the ability to get a job, there is a heightened level of hazard," said Robert Shireman, a deputy under secretary of education. "There is a lot of Pell grant money out there, and we need to make sure it's being used effectively." ...

For-profit schools have proved adept at capturing Pell grants, which are a centerpiece of the Obama administration's efforts to make higher education more affordable. The administration increased financing for Pell grants by $17 billion for 2009 and 2010 as part of its $787 billion stimulus package.

Two years ago, students at for-profit trade schools received $3.2 billion in Pell grants, according to the Department of Education, less than went to students at two-year public institutions. By the 2011-12 school year, the administration now estimates, students at for-profit schools should receive more than $10 billion in Pell grants, more than their public counterparts. (Those anticipated increases may shrink, depending on the outcome of wrangling in Congress over health care and student lending.) ...

Jeffrey West was working at a pet store near Philadelphia, earning about $8 an hour, when he saw advertisements for training programs offered by WyoTech, a chain of trade schools owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc., a publicly traded company that last year reported revenue of $1.3 billion. After Mr. West called the school, an admissions representative drove to his house to sell him on classes in auto body refinishing and upholstering technology, a nine-month program that cost about $30,000.

Read more...

Possibly related vitriol:
Feb 2010

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Updated and expanded graph. Growth and stability pact is major FAIL.


Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

Mr Obama does not mention the company by name. He does however deprecate advocates of insurance deregulation calling "less oversight and fewer rules ...the fox-guarding-the-henhouse approach to health insurance reform." He says deregulation --of current monopolistic insurer practices-- "would segment [sic] the market further." More interesting, he associates "bargaining power" of government or "big company" benefits planners opposed to insurers to the "negotiating power" of an individual member or an insurers' actuarial pool (market "segment") defined by age, location, income, plan design, and pre-existing medical condition-- rather than that purchasing power exemplified by single-payer, federal administration of managed care insurance models Medicaid and Medicare. And he of course continues to gloss guaranteed issue and guaranteed renewal provisions of coverages with premium "affordability" these bills purport to establish.Source

While I can support Mr Obama's intention to reassure employed, insured citizens that legislative opponents misrepresent substantitive health insurance regulation, I still cannot support either his alternative explanation of insurance reform or the inexplicable urgency of passing this bill, this week. I reviewed H.R. 3590 this week and it is evident to me that since 24 Dec., House intransigence and popular agitation have produced some beneficial alterations to the senate language. So-called debate must continue and senators up for re-election forced early and often to reveal their hands to constituents.

Possibly related news:

legitimate "process arguments"
"illigitimate" process arguments, Rules Committee "psy-ops"
reconciliation tactics

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

China is exploring the possibility of extending its high-speed train network as far as Europe, potentially cutting rail travel time between London and Beijing to as little as two days.

Officials hope to see the project completed over the next ten years, enabling passengers to travel the roughly 8,000 kilometre journey at speeds of up to 320 kilometres per hour.

Two lines to Europe are reportedly being considered under the proposals, one passing through India, Pakistan, and the Middle East, while a second would head to Germany via Russia. Exact routes are currently undecided however. A third line would extend south from China to connect Vietnam, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia.

Germany's foreign minister has called for the removal of Cold War legacy nuclear weapons being stored here, but some in Washington may have other plans. The US Department of Energy is requesting a budget of close to $2 billion to modernize the country's oldest models of nuclear weapons, including those being kept in Germany.

In a move that could have an impact on the future of nuclear weapons stored in Germany and other parts of Europe, the United States Department of Energy has included requests in its latest budget proposal for funding to modernize parts of the country's aging nuclear arsenal -- a move that would seem to contradict the vision of a nuclear weapons-free world President Barack Obama announced last year.

From 2011 to 2015, the agency wants to allocate close to $2 billion to push forward plans to modernize its arsenal of B-61 nuclear bombs. Some of these weapons are being kept in Europe, including some at storage facilities at the German air force base in Büchel. In total, the US Air Force still has around 150 strategic B-61 bombs in its active arsenal as well as around 400 non-strategic models and a reserve of around 200 further non-strategic bombs.

Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters in Thailand have rallied outside a military base on the outskirts of the capital in an effort to increase pressure on the country's prime minister to stand down and call fresh elections.

The protesters, known as the Reds Shirts, had set a deadline of noon on Monday (0500GMT) for Abhisit Vejjajiva to resign or face what they say will be crippling mass demonstrations in the Thai capital.

That deadline has now passed and Abhisit has rejected their demand for fresh elections.

A South African judge has convicted ANC official Julius Malema of hate speech for his comments about the woman who accused President Jacob Zuma of rape.

The Equality Court judge ordered Mr Malema to make an unconditional apology and pay 50,000 rand ($6,700; £4,500) to a centre for abused women.

The ANC Youth League leader had said the woman must have had a "nice time". Mr Zuma was acquitted of rape.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Monday boycotted Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's speech to Israel's Knesset to protest the visiting leader's refusal to lay a wreath at Mount Herzl.

Lieberman also boycotted a meeting between Lula and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claiming the Brazilian president slighted Israel by refusing the customary diplomatic visit to Mount Herzl and the gravesite of Zionist leader Theodore Herzl.

European Union environment ministers officially gave up on a decade-old target to stop the depletion of the continent's animal and plant species on Monday.

"We have missed our 2010 biodiversity target, obviously," European environment commissioner Janez Potocnik told reporters in Brussels following his first attendance at an EU environment council. "We must not repeat that mistake."

"This is year we want to establish [new] baseline targets and develop a convincing strategy on how to ensure we won't fail again," he added.

Countries bordering the Caspian sea need to sign supply contracts this year for Europe's long-planned Nabucco gas pipeline if the project is to go ahead, with a `big push' expected from the European Commission and member states involved, one of the stakeholders told this website.

Eight years into the preparation phase of the EU's most ambitious pipeline project, stakeholders are now increasingly nervous about securing the necessary gas supplies from Caspian littoral countries to make the investment worth while.

"We are basically sitting at the borders of Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan and waiting. We're in discussions, but we need now to pull this together to get the supply commitments," Jeremy Ellis, head of business development at German energy company RWE, one of the Nabucco stakeholders told EUobserver in a phone interview.

The energy contained in a photon is defined by its frequency, and that remains pretty much the same (barring a bit of gravitational redshifting) from the moment it spins out of the thermonuclear maelstrom of the Sun until the moment eight minutes later when it arrives on earth and gets absorbed by a green leaf, let's say, or the absorbent surface in a solar water heater. Once again, though, that's a matter of the quantity of energy, not the concentration. The concentration, in this case, is determined by the rate at which photons impact the leaf or the solar panel; that depends on how widely spread the photons are, and that depends, in turn, on how far the leaf and the panel are from the Sun.

Think of it this way. The individual photons that heat the planet Mercury each contain, on average, the same quantity of energy as the individual photons that heat the planet Neptune. Is Neptune as warm as Mercury? Not hardly, and the reason is that by the time they get out to the orbit of Neptune, the Sun's rays are spread out over a much vaster area, so each square foot of Neptune gets a lot fewer photons than a corresponding square foot of Mercury. The photons are less concentrated in space, and that, not the quantity of energy they each contain, determines how much of the hard work of heating a planet they are able to do. There are stars in the night sky that produce photons far more energetic, on average, than those released by the Sun, but you're not going to get a star tan from their light!

The £250bn cost of developing Canada's controversial tar sands between now and 2025 could be used to decarbonise the western economy by funding ambitious solar power schemes in the Sahara or a European wide shift to electric vehicles, according to a new report released today.

The same amount of investment would also help the world to hit half of the Millenium Development Goals in the 50 least-developed countries, says the research from The Co-operative and conservation group, WWF, which is released to coincide with a new film, Dirty Oil, being premiered in 25 cinemas around the UK today.

The European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO) will launch a new selection procedure for recruiting EU officials tomorrow (16 March). The new system aims to speed up the process of recruiting officials to under a year and move to a more predictable procedure that allows job-seekers to plan their applications and the institutions to fill their recruitment needs more efficiently.

Maroš Šefčovič, the European commissioner responsible for personnel and administration, said: "In an increasingly competitive jobs market, the European institutions have to be able to attract a diverse range of top quality applicants." He added that the institutions would only be able to convince good candidates to join if they have "the prospect of finding an attractive post without undue delay". In the past candidates have been deterred by having to wait up to two years between applying and being put on the reserve list, the final stage before getting a job in the institutions.

Allegations of sexual abuse in the German Catholic Church continue to surface. Questions have been raised about what Pope Benedict XVI may have known about specific incidents of abuse and his brother, Georg Ratzinger, is also under fire. The pope, however, has so far remained silent.

Georg Ratzinger came clean about his transgressions. Indeed, it seemed to be the end of the matter -- one which placed him squarely in the center of Germany's ever expanding Church abuse scandal.

"In the beginning, I slapped (the boys) in the face on a number of occasions," said Ratzinger, who, for decades, was the director of the Regensburger Domspatzen, one of the most renowned boys' choirs in Germany. But he stopped the practice back in 1980, he says, because the state had banned corporal punishment. He says that he "strictly" observed the new law.

It has thrills, spills, sword fights, violent sexual assault and - to modern ears - a terrible ending, but the little-known 18th century play Double Falsehood was propelled into the literary limelight today when it was claimed as a lost Shakespeare.

Professor Brean Hammond of Nottingham University will publish compelling new evidence next week that the play, a romantic tragi-comedy by Lewis Theobald is - as the author always maintained it was - substantially based on a real Shakespeare play called Cardenio.

Hammond has been backed in his assertion by the Shakespeare publisher Arden and there are unconfirmed rumours that the play will open at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre in Stratford when the venue reopens after its three-year closure

The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15 March - the 25th birthday of the day the first dotcom name was registered.

In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in dotcom.

That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon.

It took until 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one millionth dotcom was registered.

According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the "licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour", otherwise known as "moral balancing" or "compensatory ethics".

Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the "halo of green consumerism" are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal.

"We are here to try to understand you before judging you."


Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.