Category: Depravity


Gang Retaliation a public threat as police search for Akein Scott

wdsutv wdsutv

Published on May 14, 2013

Gang Retaliation a public threat as police search for Akein Scott    http://www.wdsu.com/

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Mother’s Day shooting suspect told witness he and his brother shot up crowd, NOPD says

scott brothers mug
Shawn Scott, 24, left, and his brother Akein, right, allegedly opened fire on a second-line parade on Mother’s Day in what sources say was a gang-related feud. Police say the brothers are both members of the Frenchmen and Derbigny Boys and were targeting a 35-year-old man who is believed to be affiliated with the Deslonde Boys, based in the 9th Ward. (Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office)

Sometime after 20 people were shot at a second-line parade in the 7th Ward on Mother’s Day, 19-year-old Akein Scott admitted to someone that he was the gunman shown on a widely circulated video depicting the violence, according to the New Orleans Police Department.

Scott also told that person that his older brother, Shawn, was just out of the frame, also firing bullets into the crowd, police said. Police say that person eventually told detectives what Akein Scott claimed; and by Thursday night, officers had jailed both Akein and Shawn Scott on 20 counts of attempted second-degree murder, crimes punishable by up to 50 years in prison.

In an affidavit supporting 24-year-old Shawn Scott’s arrest on Thursday, investigators state that Akein Scott told an unidentified person that he was the man shooting into a second-line crowd at the corner of Frenchmen and North Villere streets in a video police released to the public on Monday. Akein Scott said that Shawn Scott simultaneously fired bullets into the crowd from the opposite side of the street, the person told police.

NOPD Superintendent Ronal Serpas announced at a news conference Monday night that Akein Scott was wanted in the mass shooting. Scott eluded capture until late Wednesday night, when authorities apprehended him at a house in the 7500 block of Kingsport Boulevard in eastern New Orleans. Police arrested four other people at the home on charges of hiding Scott from the law.

Meanwhile, tipsters told police Shawn Scott was staying at an apartment in the 9600 block of Hayne Boulevard in eastern New Orleans.

Police secured a search warrant for the residence. On Wednesday night, NOPD SWAT members and U.S. marshals conducted undercover surveillance on the apartment in preparation for executing the warrant.

Read Full Article Here

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NOPD arrest 6 in connection to Mother’s Day shooting

Posted: May 16, 2013 3:18 PM CDT Updated: May 16, 2013 3:18 PM CDT

Nekia Youngblood (Source: NOPD) Nekia Youngblood (Source: NOPD)

Brandy George (Source: NOPD) Brandy George (Source: NOPD)

Bionca Hickerson (Source: NOPD) Bionca Hickerson (Source: NOPD)

Justin Alexander (Source: NOPD) Justin Alexander (Source: NOPD)

NEW ORLEANS (WAFB) –

New Orleans Police and the US Marshals office have arrested and booked two brothers in connection with the shooting at a Mother’s Day second line celebration that injured 19 people.
NOPD identified Akein Scott, 19, as the suspected gunman on Monday, and arrested him late Wednesday night without incident. Scott has been charged with 20 counts of attempted second degree murder and is being held on $10 million bond.
Investigators also arrested four people accused of aiding Scott after he was announced as the suspect: Nekia Youngblood, 32, Bionca Hickerson, 22, Brandy George, 28, and Justin Alexander, 19, were all booked with obstruction of justice by harboring a fugitive.
Investigators learned that Akien Scott’s older brother Shawn Scott, 24, also participated in the crime and arrested him Thursday morning. He has also been charged with 20 counts of attempted second degree murder.

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Boy, 10, injured in Mother’s Day shooting also lost cousin Briana Allen in 2012 birthday shooting

wdsutv wdsutv

Published on May 14, 2013

Ka’Nard Allen, 10, has lived through two shootings in less than a year. Read story     http://www.wdsu.com/

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Flag of U.S. - Israeli - Saudi Allegiance photo Flagofamericanisraelisaudiallegiance_zpsef286a11.jpg

Flag of U.S. – Israeli – Saudi Allegiance  

~Desert Rose~

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In Wake of US-Israeli Attack on Syria, UN Reveals Terrorists Not Government Used Sarin Gas

So-called “red line” both drawn and then crossed by US-Saudi-Israeli axis and their terrorist proxies. 

May 6, 2013 (LD) – The reasoning behind recent US-Israeli attacks on Syria has been undermined further as the UN reveals Western-backed terrorists, not the Syrian government, deployed sarin gas during the 2 year conflict. Reuters reported in their article, “U.N. has testimony that Syrian rebels used sarin gas: investigator,” that:

U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria’s civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

“Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,” Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.

Why the Small Amounts of Sarin Cited by Washington, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv are a Set Up 

The small amounts of sarin gas reportedly used would defy any tactical or strategic sense had they been deployed by the Syrian government to tip the balance in the destructive 2-year conflict. According to the US military’s own assessments of chemical weapon use during the 1980′s Iran-Iraq War, only under ideal conditions and with massive amounts of chemical agents can tactical and strategic outcomes be achieved – and that conventional weapons were still, by far, superior to chemical weapons of any kind.

A document produced by the US Marine Corps, titled, “Lessons Learned: The Iran-Iraq War” under “Appendix B: Chemical Weapons,” provides a comprehensive look at the all-out chemical warfare that took place during the devastating 8 year Iranian-Iraqi conflict. Several engagements are studied in detail, revealing large amounts of chemical agents deployed mainly to create areas of denial, not mass casualties.

The effectiveness and lethality of chemical weapons is summarized in the document as follows (emphasis added):

Chemical weapons require quite particular weather and geographic conditions for optimum effectiveness. Given the relative nonpersistence of all agents employed during this war, including mustard, there was only a brief window of employment opportunity both daily and seasonally, when the agents could be used. Even though the Iraqis employed mustard agent in the rainy season and also in the marshes, its effectiveness was significantly reduced under those conditions. As the Iraqis learned to their chagrin, mustard is not a good agent to employ in the mountains, unless you own the high ground and your enemy is in the valleys.

We are uncertain as to the relative effectiveness of nerve agents since those which were employed are by nature much less persistent than mustard. In order to gain killing concentrations of these agents, predawn attacks are best, conducted in areas where the morning breezes are likely to blow away from friendly positions.

Chemical weapons have a low kill ratio. Just as in WWl, during which the ratio of deaths to injured from chemicals was 2-3 percent, that figure appears to be borne out again in this war although reliable data on casualties are very difficult to obtain. We deem it remarkable that the death rate should hold at such a low level even with the introduction of nerve agents. If those rates are correct, as they well may be, this further reinforces the position that we must not think of chemical weapons as “a poor man’s nuclear weapon.” While such weapons have great psychological potential, they are not killers or destroyers on a scale with nuclear or biological weapons.

Clearly, the minute amounts of sarin the West has accused the Syrian government of using, makes no tactical, political, or strategic sense. However, these small amounts of sarin gas, now suspected to be the work of Western-backed terrorists, would have been perfect for establishing a pretext for Western military intervention, and in fact, have been in part cited by the US and Israel in their latest, unprovoked aerial assault on Damascus.

The terrorists operating in Syria possess the means and motivation to carry out such an operation, as do their Western sponsors.

Where Did Western-backed Terrorists Obtain Sarin? 

A number of methods could have lent sarin gas to terrorists operating in Syria – from Turkey, Israel, and the US simply handing select units the chemical agent in a clandestine operation, to Libyan terrorists confirmed to have been flooding into Syria for the past 2 years, bringing looted chemical stockpiles with them after NATO’s disastrous invasion in 2011 left them in the hands of a sectarian extremist regime.

Image: (via the Guardian) “Chemical containers in the Libyan desert. There are concerns unguarded weapons could fall into the hands of Islamist militants. Photograph: David Sperry/AP”

….

Indeed, Libya’s arsenal had fallen into the hands of sectarian extremists with NATO assistance in 2011 in the culmination of efforts to overthrow the North African nation . Since then, Libya’s militants led by commanders of Al Qaeda’s Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) have armed sectarian extremists across the Arab World, from as far West as Mali, to as far East as Syria.

Libyan LIFG terrorists are confirmed to be flooding into Syria from Libya. In November 2011, the Telegraph in their article, “Leading Libyan Islamist met Free Syrian Army opposition group,” would report:

Abdulhakim Belhadj, head of the Tripoli Military Council and the former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, “met with Free Syrian Army leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey,” said a military official working with Mr Belhadj. “Mustafa Abdul Jalil (the interim Libyan president) sent him there.”

Another Telegraph article, “Libya’s new rulers offer weapons to Syrian rebels,” would admit

Syrian rebels held secret talks with Libya’s new authorities on Friday, aiming to secure weapons and money for their insurgency against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

At the meeting, which was held in Istanbul and included Turkish officials, the Syrians requested “assistance” from the Libyan representatives and were offered arms, and potentially volunteers.
“There is something being planned to send weapons and even Libyan fighters to Syria,” said a Libyan source, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There is a military intervention on the way. Within a few weeks you will see.”

Later that month, some 600 Libyan terrorists would be reported to have entered Syria to begin combat operations and have been flooding into the country ever since.

Image: Libyan Mahdi al-Harati of the US State Department, United Nations, and the UK Home Office (page 5, .pdf)-listed terrorist organization, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), addressing fellow terrorists in Syria. Harati is now commanding a Libyan brigade operating inside of Syria attempting to destroy the Syrian government and subjugate the Syrian population. Traditionally, this is known as “foreign invasion.” 

….

In Time’s article, “Libya’s Fighters Export Their Revolution to Syria,” it is reported:

Some Syrians are more frank about the assistance the Libyans are providing. “They have heavier weapons than we do,” notes Firas Tamim, who has traveled in rebel-controlled areas to keep tabs on foreign fighters. “They brought these weapons to Syria, and they are being used on the front lines.” Among the arms Tamim has seen are Russian-made surface-to-air missiles, known as the SAM 7.

Libyan fighters largely brush off questions about weapon transfers, but in December they claimed they were doing just that. “We are in the process of collecting arms in Libya,” a Libyan fighter in Syria told the French daily Le Figaro. “Once this is done, we will have to find a way to bring them here.”

democracynow democracynow

Published on Apr 19, 2013

http://www.democracynow.org – In 1982, investigative journalist Allan Nairn interviewed a Guatemalan general named “Tito” on camera during the height of the indigenous massacres. It turns out the man was actually Otto Pérez Molina, the current Guatemalan president. We air the original interview footage and speak to Nairn about the U.S. role backing the Guatemalan dictatorship. Last week, Nairn flew to Guatemala where he had been scheduled to testify in the trial of former U.S.-backed dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. Ríos Montt was charged in connection with the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. His 17-month rule is seen as one of the bloodiest chapters in Guatemala’s decades-long campaign against Maya indigenous people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The trial took a surprising turn last week when Guatemala President Gen. Otto Pérez Molina was directly accused of ordering executions. A former military mechanic named Hugo Reyes told the court that Pérez Molina, then serving as an army major and using the name Tito Arias, ordered soldiers to burn and pillage a Maya Ixil area in the 1980s.

Exclusive: Allan Nairn Exposes Role of U.S., New Guatemalan President in Indigenous Massacres 2 of 2

democracynow democracynow

Published on Apr 19, 2013

http://www.democracynow.org – In 1982, investigative journalist Allan Nairn interviewed a Guatemalan general named “Tito” on camera during the height of the indigenous massacres. It turns out the man was actually Otto Pérez Molina, the current Guatemalan president. We air the original interview footage and speak to Nairn about the U.S. role backing the Guatemalan dictatorship. Last week, Nairn flew to Guatemala where he had been scheduled to testify in the trial of former U.S.-backed dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. Ríos Montt was charged in connection with the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. His 17-month rule is seen as one of the bloodiest chapters in Guatemala’s decades-long campaign against Maya indigenous people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The trial took a surprising turn last week when Guatemala President Gen. Otto Pérez Molina was directly accused of ordering executions. A former military mechanic named Hugo Reyes told the court that Pérez Molina, then serving as an army major and using the name Tito Arias, ordered soldiers to burn and pillage a Maya Ixil area in the 1980s.

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State Department Conducts Secret Visit with Death Squad Leader in Syria

image source

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post

As the Syrian army continues to gain the upper hand against the NATO-backed death squads made up of mercenaries, fanatics, and al-Qaeda terrorists, it appears that the Western powers responsible for the creation of the armed and violent rebellion have kicked into high gear as the advance of their proxy army has been stalled.

Even though the barbarism of death squad participants seems to have recently hit a fever pitch, while Israeli air strikes on sovereign Syrian soil are targeting military and civilian targets alike, and new found erroneous claims by Western nations of the use of chemical weapons by the Assad government, the Syrian army has managed to continue its mop up of the inappropriately named “rebels.”

Yet the Western agitators have not given up. This much is made clear by the recent “secret” visit by former U.S. Ambassador to Syria and notorious destabilization agent Robert Ford made to the current death squad leader, Gen. Salim Idriss.

This visit took place Wednesday, May 9, 2013 and was likely initiated via the Bab al-Salama crossing on the Turkey/Syria border. According to Deborah Thomas of NPR, “Ford met with the head of the Aleppo military council, Abdul Jabbar Okaidi, who thanked him for the shipment of nonlethal aid. Seven trucks transported some 65,000 MREs, or meals ready to eat, the U.S. military’s battlefield rations.”

Although no mention is made of the actual lethal aid that has been provided to the death squads by the generosity of the American taxpayer via Gulf State feudal monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Thomas points out that the MREs were part of “an additional $10 million aid package” dedicated to the death squads by the U.S. government. Secretary of State John Kerry announced in April that the United States would be donating $123 million to the Syrian death squads, despite facing a worldwide economic depression, drastic levels of unemployment at home, and a manufactured crisis such as the “sequester” and a host of other domestic crises.

Ford’s visit to Syria is both part of the overarching attempt to further destabilize the country, organize death squad activity, and create a public relations campaign aimed at forming an image of Idriss as a figure around which popular support can be rallied. This, of course, is at least the third time Western interests have attempted to create a “freedom fighter” lead image for the Syrian death squads – Moaz al-Khatib and Ghassan Hitto being the more recent failures.

Idriss appears to be nothing more than the latest incarnation of a would-be puppet dictator set up to impose the Western will upon the Syrian people and act as a proxy stabilizing force in the event of the much-desired (on the part of NATO) removal of Assad. Idriss was actually a military officer in the Assad government himself until defecting in 2012. Now, he is the official commander of the Free Syrian Army and thus a comrade in arms of al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and a ragtag band of fanatics, mental deficients, traitors, and mercenaries.

As Webster Tarpley commented on PressTV on May 10, 2013,

Well, I think we have some mixed signals from the Obama regime here. Let us hasten to say that anybody calling themselves “Free Syrian Army” is, in fact, a representative of the al-Nusra Front because we’re getting reports everyday of more and more units of the so-called FSA showing their true colors or going over to Nusra and proclaiming themselves full-fledged terrorists, al-Qaeda disciples, death squads in every sense of the word. Now, we had, in the last twenty four hours, Ambassador Robert Ford of the State Department, somebody who did a lot to get this tragic rebellion going in the first place . . . Ambassador Robert Ford who is a taskmaster of death squad deployments, having learned it from Negrponte in Baghdad some years ago, he crossed into Syria, not with the permission of the Syrian government, but to go and meet General Idriss. And this General, Salim Idriss, is the new golden boy here. He is the new darling of the CIA and the State Department. And it looks like Ford is trying to coordinate the next move with Idriss. You can think of Idriss as the new Ahmed Chalabi – somebody the U.S. is grooming to become dictator of the country.

Of course, this is not the first time that Ford has engaged in a publicity-based visit to the Syrian death squads inside Syria, thus drawing the ire of the Syrian government. In 2011, after his travel as U.S. Ambassador had been restricted due to his destabilization efforts already taking place, Ford traveled to Hama in order to promote and encourage the violent assault waged by the Western-backed death squads against innocent Syrian civilians as well as Syrian soldiers.

Ford’s very presence in Syria was never anything more than a destabilization tactic. Indeed, he has managed to draw quite a bit of international attention to himself by traveling across the country at will, “meeting with protestors” and turning terrorists into martyrs in the minds of the gullible Western public.

Logically, by “meeting with protestors” one can read “instigating terrorism.” The mainstream media, however, reported Ford’s terror encouragement tour as a heroic act of solidarity with “the people.”

Ford’s action in Syria, even as the official U.S. Ambassador, served exactly the same purpose as his presence in Iraq only a few years previous. With Syria, however, it seems that Ford attempted to take on a more central role in the affair. Indeed, many Syrians, if not aware of the more specific sinister acts of Ford, are at least aware that he has been instrumental in fomenting violent rebellion and negative Western public opinion against the ruling government. This is why Ford’s convoy was attacked by “pro-government” Syrians as he rode through town meeting with his terrorist pets.

The reality is that Ford is nothing more than a globalist chaos promoter who is merely taking over from his mentor John Negroponte, who became quite refined as a enabler of mass slaughter in Central America and Iraq. Indeed, Negroponte’s Iraq affair is where Ford himself was able to hone his skills in the arming and assistance of ruthless death squads who target innocent people in campaigns of terror and mass murder.

It should be noted that Prof. Michel Chossudovsky of GlobalResearch.ca has provided an excellent historical presentation of the connections of Negroponte, Ford, and even David Petraeus in relation to death squads and destabilization in his article “The Pentagon’s ‘Salvador Option’: The Deployment of Death Squads in Iraq and Syria.” I encourage everyone to read this excellent piece for context and analysis as a companion to my own article.

Read Full Article Here

Convicted abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell is spared death penalty

 

 

Dr. Kermit Gosnell

Dr. Kermit Gosnell is escorted to a police van upon leaving the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia after being convicted. (Yong Kim / Associated Press / May 13, 2013)

 

PHILADELPHIA — Kermit Gosnell, the abortion doctor convicted of killing three babies who were born alive in his grimy clinic, agreed Tuesday to give up his right to an appeal and now faces life in prison but will be spared a death sentence.

The 72-year-old Philadelphia doctor was found guilty Monday of first-degree murder in the deaths of the babies, who were killed with scissors.

In a case that became a flash point in the nation’s abortion debate, former clinic employees testified that Gosnell routinely performed illegal abortions past Pennsylvania’s 24-week limit, that he delivered babies who were still moving, whimpering or breathing, and that he and his assistants dispatched the newborns by “snipping” their spines, as he referred to it.

Prosecutors agreed to two life sentences without parole, and Gosnell was to be sentenced Wednesday in the death of the third baby, an involuntary manslaughter conviction in the death of a patient and hundreds of lesser counts.

Prosecutors had sought the death penalty because Gosnell killed more than one person, and his victims were especially vulnerable given their age. But Gosnell’s advanced age had made it unlikely he would ever be executed before his appeals ran out.

Gosnell has said he considered himself a pioneering inner-city doctor who helped desperate women get late-term abortions. Defense lawyer Jack McMahon said before the sentencing deal that his client’s bid for acquittal was a battle.

“The media has been overwhelmingly against him,” McMahon said. “But I think the jury listened to the evidence … and they found what they found.”

The gruesome details of Gosnell’s operation came out more than two years ago during a grand jury investigation of prescription drug trafficking. Authorities raiding Gosnell’s clinic for drugs instead found bags and bottles of fetuses, including jars of severed feet, along with bloodstained furniture, dirty medical instruments and cats roaming the premises.

 

 

Read Full Article Here

The People vs. Goldman Sachs

A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

May 11, 2011 9:30 AM ET
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein tesifies before the Senate in April 2010
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein tesifies before the Senate in April 2010
Mark Wilson/Getty Images

They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.

The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — “a million fraud cases a year” is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin’s small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street’s aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.

Photo Gallery: How Goldman top dogs defrauded their clients and lied to Congress

To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a financial big fish from the mortgage bubble, and that was Lee Farkas, a Florida lender who was just convicted on a smorgasbord of fraud charges and now faces life in prison. But Farkas, sadly, is just an exception proving the rule: Like Bernie Madoff, his comically excessive crime spree (which involved such lunacies as kiting checks to his own bank and selling loans that didn’t exist) was almost completely unconnected to the systematic corruption that led to the crisis. What’s more, many of the earlier criminals in the chain of corruption — from subprime lenders like Countrywide, who herded old ladies and ghetto families into bad loans, to rapacious banks like Washington Mutual, who pawned off fraudulent mortgages on investors — wound up going belly up, sunk by their own greed.

Read Full Article Here
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Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix

 

Illustration by Victor Juhasz
April 25, 2013 1:00 PM ET

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia

Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.

“It’s a double conspiracy,” says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s the height of criminality.”

The bad news didn’t stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. “Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry,” CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.

But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’ incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

“A farce,” was one antitrust lawyer’s response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.

“Incredible,” says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.

 

Read Full Article Here

 

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Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come

January 4, 2013 4:25 PM ET
national affairs secrets of the bailout taibbi
Illustration by Victor Juhasz

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn’t the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs. “It is,” says former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky, “the ultimate bait-and-switch.”

The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout. The only reason investors haven’t run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed. Investors may not actually believe the lie, but they are impressed by how totally committed the government has been, from the very beginning, to selling it.

THEY LIED TO PASS THE BAILOUT

Today what few remember about the bailouts is that we had to approve them. It wasn’t like Paulson could just go out and unilaterally commit trillions of public dollars to rescue Goldman Sachs and Citigroup from their own stupidity and bad management (although the government ended up doing just that, later on). Much as with a declaration of war, a similarly extreme and expensive commitment of public resources, Paulson needed at least a film of congressional approval. And much like the Iraq War resolution, which was only secured after George W. Bush ludicrously warned that Saddam was planning to send drones to spray poison over New York City, the bailouts were pushed through Congress with a series of threats and promises that ranged from the merely ridiculous to the outright deceptive. At one meeting to discuss the original bailout bill – at 11 a.m. on September 18th, 2008 – Paulson actually told members of Congress that $5.5 trillion in wealth would disappear by 2 p.m. that day unless the government took immediate action, and that the world economy would collapse “within 24 hours.”

To be fair, Paulson started out by trying to tell the truth in his own ham-headed, narcissistic way. His first TARP proposal was a three-page absurdity pulled straight from a Beavis and Butt-Head episode – it was basically Paulson saying, “Can you, like, give me some money?” Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, remembers a call with Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. “We need $700 billion,” they told Brown, “and we need it in three days.” What’s more, the plan stipulated, Paulson could spend the money however he pleased, without review “by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

The White House and leaders of both parties actually agreed to this preposterous document, but it died in the House when 95 Democrats lined up against it. For an all-too-rare moment during the Bush administration, something resembling sanity prevailed in Washington.

So Paulson came up with a more convincing lie. On paper, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was simple: Treasury would buy $700 billion of troubled mortgages from the banks and then modify them to help struggling homeowners. Section 109 of the act, in fact, specifically empowered the Treasury secretary to “facilitate loan modifications to prevent avoidable foreclosures.” With that promise on the table, wary Democrats finally approved the bailout on October 3rd, 2008. “That provision,” says Barofsky, “is what got the bill passed.”

But within days of passage, the Fed and the Treasury unilaterally decided to abandon the planned purchase of toxic assets in favor of direct injections of billions in cash into companies like Goldman and Citigroup. Overnight, Section 109 was unceremoniously ditched, and what was pitched as a bailout of both banks and homeowners instantly became a bank-only operation – marking the first in a long series of moves in which bailout officials either casually ignored or openly defied their own promises with regard to TARP.

Congress was furious. “We’ve been lied to,” fumed Rep. David Scott, a Democrat from Georgia. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, raged at transparently douchey TARP administrator (and Goldman banker) Neel Kashkari, calling him a “chump” for the banks. And the anger was bipartisan: Republican senators David Vitter of Louisiana and James Inhofe of Oklahoma were so mad about the unilateral changes and lack of oversight that they sponsored a bill in January 2009 to cancel the remaining $350 billion of TARP.

So what did bailout officials do? They put together a proposal full of even bigger deceptions to get it past Congress a second time. That process began almost exactly four years ago – on January 12th and 15th, 2009 – when Larry Summers, the senior economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, sent a pair of letters to Congress. The pudgy, stubby­fingered former World Bank economist, who had been forced out as Harvard president for suggesting that women lack a natural aptitude for math and science, begged legislators to reject Vitter’s bill and leave TARP alone.

In the letters, Summers laid out a five-point plan in which the bailout was pitched as a kind of giant populist program to help ordinary Americans. Obama, Summers vowed, would use the money to stimulate bank lending to put people back to work. He even went so far as to say that banks would be denied funding unless they agreed to “increase lending above baseline levels.” He promised that “tough and transparent conditions” would be imposed on bailout recipients, who would not be allowed to use bailout funds toward “enriching shareholders or executives.” As in the original TARP bill, he pledged that bailout money would be used to aid homeowners in foreclosure. And lastly, he promised that the bailouts would be temporary – with a “plan for exit of government intervention” implemented “as quickly as possible.”

 

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Cleveland women start road to recovery after nightmare

 

 

 

Year after year, the clock ticked by and the calendar marched forward, carrying the three women further from the real world and pulling them deeper into an isolated nightmare.

 

Now, for the women freed from captivity inside a Cleveland house, the ordeal is not over. Next comes recovery — from sexual abuse and their sudden, jarring re-entry into a world much different from the one they were snatched from a decade ago.

 

Therapists say that with extensive treatment and support, healing is likely for the women, who were 14, 16 and 21 when they were abducted. But it is often a long and difficult process.

 

“It’s sort of like coming out of a coma,” says Dr. Barbara Greenberg, a psychologist who specializes in treating abused teenagers. “It’s a very isolating and bewildering experience.”

 

 

Play Video

Michelle Knight’s grandmother: She doesn’t want to be seen right now

 

The physical healing may take longer for some than for others. Michelle Knight may need reconstructive surgery for injuries suffered at the hands of her accused attacker, CBS Cleveland affiliate WOIO-TV reports.

 

Her grandmother, Deborah Knight, confirmed the information, telling WOIO-TV Thursday: “When she was severely beaten, he had beat her so bad in the face, she has to have facial reconstruction, and she’s lost hearing in one ear.”

 

Knight was released from MetroHealth Friday, the last of the three women to do so.

 

In the world the women left behind, a gallon of gas cost about $1.80. Barack Obama was a state senator. Phones were barely taking pictures. Things did not “go viral.” There was no YouTube, no Facebook, no iPhone.

 

Emerging into the future is difficult enough. The two younger Cleveland women are doing it without the benefit of crucial formative years.

 

“By taking away their adolescence, they weren’t able to develop emotional and psychological and social skills,” says Duane Bowers, who counsels traumatized families through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

 

“They’re 10 years behind in these skills. Those need to be caught up before they can work on reintegrating into society,” he says.

 

 

28 Photos

Kidnap victims freed in Cleveland

 

That society can be terrifying. As freed captive Gina DeJesus arrived home from the hospital, watched by a media horde, she hid herself beneath a hooded sweatshirt. The freed Amanda Berry slipped into her home without being seen.

 

“They weren’t hiding from the press, from the cameras,” Bowers says. “They were hiding from the freedom, from the expansiveness.”

 

In the house owned by Ariel Castro, who is charged with kidnapping and raping the women, claustrophobic control ruled. Police say Castro kept them chained in a basement and locked in upstairs rooms, that he fathered a child with one of them, and that he starved and beat his captives into multiple miscarriages.

 

In all those years, they only set foot outside of the house twice — and then only as far as the garage.

 

“Something as simple as walking into a Target is going to be a major problem for them,” Bowers says.

 

Jessica Donohue-Dioh, who works with survivors of human trafficking as a social work instructor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, says the freedom to make decisions can be one of the hardest parts of recovery.

 

Read Full Article and  Watch Video  Here

 

corbettreport corbettreport

Published on May 8, 2013

TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=7341

As investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker has demonstrated, the address for the Congress of Chechen International Organizations just happened to be the home address of Graham E. Fuller, formerly Vice Chairman of the Reagan-era CIA’s National Intelligence Council. The relationship between Ruslan and this former top CIA official was not a loose one. Tsarni married Fuller’s daughter in the mid-1990s and lived in Fuller’s home for some time, basing his terror-supporting operation under Fuller’s own roof.

 

The BBC visits Lorain Avenue in Cleveland to find out how the missing girls cases impacted a community

 

Ohio prosecutors have said they plan to seek aggravated murder charges that could carry the death penalty, against the man suspected of imprisoning three women for about a decade.

 

The charges relate to alleged forced miscarriages suffered by one victim.

 

Ariel Castro, 52, was arraigned in court earlier for the kidnap and rape of Amanda Berry, 27, Gina DeJesus, 23 and Michelle Knight, 32.

 

Ms Berry escaped on Monday and was able to raise the alarm.

 

Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty said the murder charges were based on evidence from one of the women held captive in Mr Castro’s house that he had impregnated her, then physically abused and starved her in order to induce miscarriages.

‘Private prison’

“I fully intend to seek charges for each and every act of sexual violence, rape, each day of kidnapping, every felonious assault, all his attempted murders, and each act of aggravated murder he committed by terminating pregnancies that the offender perpetuated against the hostages during this decade-long ordeal,” Mr McGinty told a news conference.

 

Tim McGinty, prosecutor: “These women desperately need a chance to heal before we seek further evidence”

 

“My office will also engage in a formal process in which we evaluate to seek charges eligible for the death penalty.

 

“This child kidnapper operated a torture chamber and private prison in the heart of our city,” he added.

 

Earlier on Thursday, Mr Castro appeared in court in Cleveland, handcuffed and dressed in blue overalls. He did not enter a plea.

 

He is charged with four counts of kidnapping, covering the three initial abduction victims and Jocelyn, Ms Berry’s six-year-old daughter, who was apparently conceived and born in captivity.

 

The former school bus driver also faces three counts of rape, one against each woman.

 

Read Full Article Here

 

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Cleveland rescue: The mystery of 2207 Seymour Avenue

 

A view of Seymour Avenue

 

 

Ariel Castro’s house at 2207 Seymour Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio, is yet to give up many of its secrets.

 

What lies inside the run-down clapboard house where Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight are said to have spent their captivity?

 

The house appears to have been the scene of a double life – as Mr Castro’s home and as a kidnap den where he is alleged to have held three women captive for almost a decade.

 

The two-storey building stands right in the middle of a tree-lined street in Cleveland’s West Side neighbourhood – a working-class area home to a close-knit community.

 

Few details have been confirmed about what it contains, but some facts are known.

 

Mr Castro bought the house in 1992 for $12,000 (£7,750), according to the Cuyahoga County Auditor’s office. In 2012, it was valued at $36,100 (£23,300).

 

The property currently faces repossession over the non-payment of taxes, with Mr Castro owing some $2,501 (£1,615) in taxes for the period 2010-12.

 

The property has four bedrooms, a bathroom, a 760sq ft (71sq m) basement, two porches and an attic. There is also a detached garage.

 

They [the women] had no ability to leave the home or interact with anyone other than each other, the child and the suspect”

US law enforcement official

 

The continuing investigation and charges of kidnap and rape levelled at Mr Castro centre on what happened to the women while they were in the house.

 

Ariel Castro’s son, Anthony – who says he visited the house just two weeks ago – told MailOnline that the doors to the basement, the attic and the garage were always padlocked and family members were not allowed to go there.

 

Anthony Castro described his father as a violent and controlling man, who beat him and nearly killed his mother in the early 1990s.

 

After years of abuse, his mother decided to move out of the house in 1996, taking him and his three sisters with her, Mr Castro said.

 

“It’s astonishing to even think… that I was so close to that. That I was physically at the house two weeks ago while that was going on, it’s a lot to grasp,” he said.

 

What did Ariel Castro’s neighbours know?

 

Police are yet to release any pictures from the inside of the property, but one law enforcement official has described the conditions there as “abysmal at best”.

 

“They (the women) had no ability to leave the home or interact with anyone other than each other, the child and the suspect,” the official told the New York Times.

 

Media reports also suggest that the authorities have discovered chains and tape inside the house allegedly used to restrain the women.

 

A police report suggests the women were all initially kept chained in the cellar, but eventually allowed to live on the second floor of the house.

 

One report cites the victims as saying the “big inside door” of the home was usually locked when Mr Castro went out. On Monday, he apparently forgot to lock it as he went to a nearby McDonald’s.

 

Even so, Amanda Berry was afraid to break open the locked storm door because “she thought Ariel (Castro) was testing her,” said the police report.

 

Instead, she tried to get the attention of neighbours to help; her screams were heard by Charles Ramsey who lived across the street and came to the rescue.

 

Police say officers were sent to the house twice, in 2000 and 2004.

 

In March 2000, Ariel Castro reported a fight on the street – but no arrests were made. In January 2004 police went to the address after Mr Castro, then a school bus driver, reportedly left a child on a bus. No-one appeared to be in the house.

 

An investigation later found no criminal intent by Mr Castro, police told local news site Cleveland.com.

Several miscarriages

Rather than celebrating their birthdays, in a bizarre ritual, the captor would apparently give his victims cake to mark their “abduction day”, one victim’s cousin was quoted as telling US media.

 

In recent years, the kidnapper was occasionally seen walking in the area with a young girl – apparently Jocelyn, whom he fathered with Ms Berry and with whom he also visited relatives, reported the New York Times.

 

One cousin from Ohio said Mr Castro had visited with a well-presented girl a couple of years ago, whom the suspect had introduced as his granddaughter.

 

Apparently the suspect had insisted Jocelyn was not told the names of Ms Knight or Ms DeJesus in case she repeated them in public.

 

Read Full Article Here

Ariel Castro charged with kidnapping, rape of three Cleveland women

Ariel Castro will be charged with four counts of kidnapping and three counts of rape in the case of the three women in Cleveland, Ohio. Onil and Pedro Castro do not face charges at this time.

By Yamiche Alcindor, Donna Leinwand Leger and Gary Strauss, USA TODAY6:07 p.m. EDT May 8, 2013

CLEVELAND — The man at whose home three women were found after a decade of captivity was charged Wednesday with multiple counts of kidnapping and rape.

Ariel Castro, 52, faces three counts of rape and four counts of kidnapping involving victims Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight. The three vanished between 2002 and 2004. Castro was also charged with kidnapping in connection with Berry’s six-year-old daughter, Jocelyn, who was also found at the home Monday and is believed to be Castro’s child.

Authorities revealed little about their investigation into the case, which is on-going, but said they had gathered hundreds of pieces of evidence. The felony charges against Castro came 48 hours after Berry – now 27 – made a frantic flight from Castro’s Seymour Avenue home early Monday evening. Authorities say that may have been the first opportunity any of the victims had to escape captivity.

Castro is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday at 8:30 a.m. Additional charges could be filed at a later date. Police reports say Castro allegedly lured all three into his car on three separate occasions.

Castro’s brothers, Pedro and Onil, were also arrested Monday. But Victor Perez, chief deputy prosecutor for Cleveland, said there is no evidence that either – who did not live at the Seymour Ave. home – had any involvement in the crimes against the three women or Berry’s daughter. Both face Thursday court hearings on outstanding misdemeanor warrants, Perez said.

Earlier Wednesday, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus returned to their Cleveland homes, where they were surrounded by family and friends. Knight was still in a Cleveland hospital Wednesday.

DeJesus, wearing a lime green hoodie, stepped from a car, and gave a thumbs up as the crowd chanted “Gina! Gina!” A woman then pulled her into a tight embrace and hustled her inside through a forest of flowers and balloons.

Nancy Ruiz, DeJesus’ mother, thanked those who had helped the family over the past nine years. “Even the ones that doubted, I want to thank them the most,” she said. “They’re the ones that made me stronger, the ones that made me feel the most that my daughter was out there.”

Gina’s aunt, Sandra Ruiz, called on friends, relatives and the media “to give us time and privacy to heal.”

“There are not enough words to say or express the joy that we feel with the return of our family member, Gina,” she said. “And now Amanda Berry, the daughter, and Michelle Knight, who is our family also.”

Ruiz also called on the community to help search for Ashley Summers, another young woman from the area who went missing at the age of 14 in 2007.

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