Hissyspit
Hissyspit's JournalGoldman Person Leaked Apple, Intel Secrets: Lawyer
Source: Reuters
Goldman person leaked Apple, Intel secrets: lawyer
NEW YORK | Fri Mar 16, 2012 7:30pm EDT
By Grant McCool
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A person at Goldman Sachs Group Inc, who has not been identified or charged in a broad U.S. insider-trading probe, was caught on a wiretap leaking secrets about Intel Corp and Apple Inc, a lawyer for accused former Goldman board member Rajat Gupta said in court on Friday.
Lawyer Gary Naftalis, in a heated exchange with U.S. prosecutor Reed Brodsky during a pre-trial hearing, said the Goldman person leaked confidential information about the two companies to Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon Group hedge fund founder convicted of insider-trading charges last year.
Gupta, the best-known corporate executive accused in a sweeping prosecution of insider-trading at hedge funds in recent years, denies criminal charges that he tipped Rajaratnam with Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble Co secrets between 2007 and 2009. His trial is scheduled to begin in May.
"In a letter he (Brodsky) said the government had a person who provided confidential information to Raj Rajaratnam about Apple and Intel," Naftalis said. "There is also wiretap evidence, substantial evidence of another source at Goldman Sachs."
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE82F1EB20120316?irpc=932
Roger Ebert: Hey Kids! Anybody Here Not Heard the F-Word? ("Bully" Anti-Bullying Documentary & MPAA)
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/03/even_as_i_write_on.htmlHey, kids! Anybody here not heard the F-word?
By Roger Ebert on March 15, 2012 10:04 PM | 20 Comments
Even as I write on Thursday night, a screening of "Bully" is taking place in Washington that may or may not result in the film's MPAA rating being changed from R to PG-13. Jen Chaney suggests in her Washington Post blog that a compromise might even be possible. The film is a documentary about how bullying affected five families, and led to two suicides. It was slapped with an R, because of its use of the F-word. Chaney asked Lee Hirsch, the film's director, "whether there was any chance he would consider bleeping out one or two of those expletives if that guaranteed a PG-13 designation for the movie, thereby allowing teen audiences to see it."
Hirsch replied he believes the F-word makes the bullying more real. Yes, and so no doubt it does. In its article on the MPAA ratings, Wikipedia tells us: "If a film uses "one of the harsher sexually derived words" (such as fuck) one to four times, it is routine today for the film to receive a PG-13 rating, provided that the word is used as an expletive and not with a sexual meaning." Apparently "Bully" either exceeds the count or refers to sexuality. I haven't seen the film, but let's say it uses the word more than four times. Then let's say Hirsch removes some of those uses so that it is employed only once. Would that earn him a PG-13? He tells Chaney he's willing to do whatever will help bullied kids. But he adds: "If you take that away, it's one more notch against that experience. It's one more big societal minimizing, or sort of, negating, of the full extent of terror that comes with bullying."
Of course he is right. If a director wants to make a film against bullying, it is not for a committee of MPAA bean-counters to tell him what words he can use. Not many years ago, the word rape was not used in newspapers, on television--or in the movies, for that matter. But there is a crime, and the name of the crime is rape, and if you remove the word you help make the crime invisible.
This is yet another example of the MPAA sidestepping ethical judgments by falling back on the technicalities of its guidelines. It is even more insidious because the MPAA never clearly spells out its guidelines, leaving it to filmmakers to guess--although they often judge by past experience. It seems to me that either the f-word word is permissible, or it is not. If impermissible, nobody should use it at all in a PG-13 film. If permissible, nobody should count. Is it a magic word, a totemistic expression that dare not say its own name? Is it a vulgar equivalent of such a word as G-d?
The MPAA began to set this trap for itself when it got into the ratings business in the first place...
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Church of England's Archbishop of Canterbury to Step Down
Source: Reuters
Church of England's Achbishop of Canterbury to step down
LONDON (Reuters) - The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion, announced on Friday he will step down at the end of the year after a decade of struggling to prevent a schism over women and gay bishops and same-sex unions.
The 80-million strong worldwide Communion has been threatened with division for a number of years, with reformists and conservatives failing to bend to his authority or attempts at consensus.
He will step down at the end of December to take up an academic role at Magdalene College, Cambridge University, his office said in a statement.
(Reporting by Avril Ormsby)
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE82F0HX20120316?irpc=932Link to source
Clashes Flare in Bahrain on Arab Spring Anniversary
Source: Reuters
Clashes flare in Bahrain on Arab Spring anniversary
Thu Mar 15, 2012 5:41pm EDT
DUBAI (Reuters) - Shi'ite Muslims clashed with riot police in villages across Bahrain on Thursday, the anniversary of a government crackdown last year on a pro-democracy uprising in the Gulf Arab state.
Witnesses said youths and police faced off in Shi'ite areas including Sitra, Diraz, Malkiya, Saar, Jidhafs, Tubli and Bilad al-Qadeem, all districts outside or on the edge of the capital Manama.
Police, who are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, fired tear gas, rubber bullets and sound grenades while youths threw petrol bombs - a pattern that has repeated itself almost daily for months.
But the clashes were more intense because of the anniversary of the breakup of protests across the country by force. There were unconfirmed reports of several injuries among protesters from direct hits by tear gas canisters.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE82E1A620120315?irpc=932
How a Christian Fighter Pilot and FOX News Tried to Stop Fort Bragg Atheist Festival (And Failed)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/chris-rodda/how-a-christian-fighter-p_b_1348764.htmlHow a Christian Fighter Pilot and FOX News Tried to Stop Fort Bragg Atheist Festival (And Failed)
Chris Rodda
- snip -
For those who don't know what Rock Beyond Belief is, it's the secular answer to all the big evangelical and fundamentalist Christian concerts and festivals regularly held on bases throughout the military. One of these events, a Billy Graham Evangelistic Association Rock the Fort festival, held at Fort Bragg in September 2010, despite complaints that the military officially sponsoring such an event was an unconstitutional promotion of religion, and showed a government preference for Christianity. The response from the commander of Fort Bragg was that any other group could also hold a similar event. So, SGT Justin Griffith, an atheist soldier at Fort Bragg, decided to take Fort Bragg up un this offer, and began planning a secular festival, which would feature atheist and secularist speakers and musicians.
Over the past year and a half, I've watched SGT Griffith transform from a soldier who had an idea to one of the leading voices for atheists in the military, standing his ground in the face of every obstacle thrown in his path. This soldier has managed to put together an event to rival the largest events put on by large, well funded organizations like the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association -- all while serving as an active duty soldier, which included being deployed, becoming a father for the first time, and not being permitted to work on the event during duty hours (despite the fact that Fort Bragg had had a whole team of military personnel and DoD employees working for months on the Billy Graham.event). If our military is looking for leaders who can get things done, they certainly have one in SGT Griffith!
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About a month and a half ago, Major Dowty's alarmist blog posts, full of misrepresentations and lies about SGT Griffith and Rock Beyond Belief, caught the eye of FOX News columnist Todd Starnes, who then wrote an article titled "Church-Burning Video Used to Promote Atheist Event at Ft. Bragg." Starnes's article linked to a blog post by Major Dowty titled, "Fort Bragg to Host Anti-Religion Band at Atheist Rock Beyond Belief," in which Dowty misrepresented the lyrics of a song by one of the bands in the Rock Beyond Belief lineup, claiming that this band advocated burning down churches. The attention of FOX News led to unwarranted last minute scrutiny by officials at Fort Bragg of the the Rock Beyond Belief lineup, and an attempt to place further restrictions on the event. But, once again, SGT Griffith stood his ground and prevailed.
Because SGT Griffith is an active duty soldier, he cannot respond to the attacks of Major Dowty without the fear of being considered insubordinate towards a superior officer, so I've been responding to these attacks on my blog at FreethoughtBlogs.com. But now that Rock Beyond Belief is getting more media attention, from sources such as the Religion News Service, and is likely to get more attention as the event date gets closer, I want to post these posts here so that a wider audience can see a part of this story that they won't get from other sources -- how one zealous Christian Air Force officer and FOX News attempted to cause last minute problems for Rock Beyond Belief, and how their plan backfired.
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Bruce Springsteen Interviewed by Jon Stewart in RS: 'What Happened To That Social Contract?'
Interviewed By Jon Stewart:
"Hope and Dreams" and other songs on the album's second half seem to move from the personal and political to a sense of the spiritual.
Well, on the first half of the record, you're just pissed off. The first cut, "We Take Care of Our Own," is where I set out the questions that I'm going to try to answer. The song's chorus is posed as a challenge and a question. Do we take care of our own? What happened to that social contract? Where did that go over the past 30 years? How has it been eroded so terribly? And how is it that the outrage about that erosion is just beginning to be voiced right now? I've written about this stuff for those 30 years, from Darkness on the Edge of Town to The Ghost of Tom Joad through to today. It all came out of the Carter recession of the late Seventies, and when I was writing about that, my brother-in-law lost his construction job and went to work as a janitor in the local high school. It changed his life.
So these are issues and things that occur over and over again in history and land on the backs of the same people. In my music – if it has a purpose beyond dancing and fun and vacuuming your floor to it – I always try to gauge the distance between American reality and the American dream. The mantra that I go into in the last verse of "We Take Care of Our Own" – "Where are the eyes, where are the hearts?" – it's really: "Where are those things now, what happened to those things over the past 30 years? What happened to the social fabric of the world that we're living in? What's the price that people pay for it on a daily basis?" Which is something that I lived with intensely as a child, and is probably the prime motivation for the subjects I've written about since I was very, very young.
Someone wrote in The New York Times that "We Take Care of Our Own" was "jingoistic."
Whoever said that, they need a smarter pop writer.
(Laughs) It takes you back to the days of "Born in the U.S.A.," which was so widely misunderstood.
Yeah. I didn't feel that so much from this particular instance, but you write the best piece of music you can, and you put it out there, and then you see what comes back at you. Lately, it seems as if the polarization of the country has gotten so extreme that people want to force you into being either a phony "patriot" or an "apologist." Nuanced political dialogue or creative expression seems like it's been hamstrung by the decay of political speech and it's infantilized our national discourse. I can't go for that and I won't write that way.
To read the rest of this cover story, pick up the March 29th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone, available on stands and in Rolling Stone All Access March 16th.
MORE: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/cover-story-excerpt-bruce-springsteen-20120314#ixzz1p6K2ItJR
Watchdog Says Banks Impeded Foreclosure Inquiry
Source: Reuters
Watchdog says banks impeded foreclosure inquiry
By Aruna Viswanatha and Margaret Chadbourn
WASHINGTON | Tue Mar 13, 2012 1:08pm EDT
(Reuters) - Top banks impeded a federal inquiry into their foreclosure processes, according to a report released Tuesday, dragging their feet on turning over documents and blocking investigators' attempts to interview bank employees.
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But the banks hampered an early investigation into whether they were pursuing unlawful foreclosures through shoddy paperwork and lax controls, the inspector general's office at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said in its report.
Bank of America (BAC.N), for example, provided only excerpts of files, incomplete documents, and conflicting information to government investigators, and refused to provide some of its foreclosure policies.
It also limited employee interviews, and refused to let employees answer certain questions, the report said.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/13/us-housing-foreclosures-idUSBRE82C10L20120313
Wisconsin Approves Recall Votes for More Republican Senators
Source: Reuters
Wisconsin approves recall votes for more Republican senators
By Brendan O'Brien
MADISON, WISCONSIN | Mon Mar 12, 2012 9:20pm EDT
MADISON, Wisconsin (Reuters) - Four more Wisconsin Republican state senators, including the Senate leader, will face recall elections this year, bringing the number of state lawmakers forced to campaign in special elections to 40 percent of the entire Senate, officials said.
The state agency that oversees elections agreed unanimously on Monday that enough valid signatures by voters were submitted to require all four senators to face recall votes.
The four lawmakers include Senate President Scott Fitzgerald, a chief architect of an anti-union law passed last year that sparked the recall movement.
- snip -
The decision means 13 of the state's 33 senators will have already faced a recall vote or will soon face one since Republican Governor Scott Walker pushed an anti-union law through the legislature last March.
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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE82B1CJ20120313?irpc=932
“I felt like I had been arrested for a thought crime"
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/nyregion/occupy-wall-street-protesters-complain-of-police-monitoring.html?_r=1Wall Street Protesters Complain of Police Surveillance
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
Published: March 11, 2012
On Nov. 17, Kira Moyer-Sims was near the Manhattan Bridge, buying coffee while three friends waited nearby in a car. More than a dozen blocks away, protesters gathered for an Occupy Wall Street “day of action,” which organizers had described as an attempt to block the streets around the New York Stock Exchange.
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Then, Ms. Moyer-Sims said, about 30 police officers surrounded her and the people in the car.
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“I felt like I had been arrested for a thought crime,” she said.
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Although she told them they could not enter, Ms. Nurse said, an officer used his foot to prevent the front door from closing behind her, followed her into the building’s entryway vestibule, and threatened to arrest her for obstruction of government administration. Ms. Nurse said the visit did not feel like a coincidence.
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