Reuters – An overwhelming majority of Americans wants Wall Street subjected to tougher regulation in the aftermath of the bank bailout and the bonus scandals that have rocked the U.S. financial sector, according to a Harris poll released on Thursday. The findings suggest that 82 percent of Americans want the government to clamp down more strongly on Wall Street excesses, with a particular emphasis on bonus schemes that have rewarded employees at loss-making companies such as American International Group. Read Article
Guardian UK – Companies across Europe are hoarding permits to produce greenhouse gas emissions worth hundreds of millions of pounds, the Guardian can reveal. The surplus credits have been amassed from over-allocation of permits to pollute from the European emissions trading scheme, and by buying cheap credits from carbon-cutting projects in developing countries and holding on to their more expensive official EU allowances. The saved permits can be used to meet future targets to cut the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming and climate change without actually reducing pollution, or sold for a profit in the future. Read Article
Times Online – The Italian Parliament has approved a law that will shield Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, from criminal trials for the next year and a half. The decision led to vociferous protests from magistrates, judges and the centre-Left opposition. The law, passed last night, in effect undermines two trials in which Mr Berlusconi, 73, is accused of corruption. In one he is charged with giving David Mills, his former British tax lawyer and estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister, a bribe to lie for him in court in corruption cases in the 1990s. In the second his television company Mediaset is accused of tax fraud over the purchase of Hollywood film rights. Read article
Times Online – The threat of violent protests loomed over Iraq yesterday as the country’s leading opposition politician said that there was widespread fraud in last week’s elections. Ayad Allawi told Western officials that aides to Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, had hidden ballot papers and falsified computer records in an effort to retain power. “They are stealing the votes of the Iraqi people,” his spokesman told a press conference called to set out the main claims. Read article
The Columbus Dispatch – WASHINGTON – Dozens of former federal officials are playing leading roles in helping carmakers handle federal investigations of auto defects, including those for Toyota’s runaway acceleration problems. A Washington Post analysis shows that as many as 33 former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration employees and Transportation Department appointees left those jobs and now work for automakers as lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and in other jobs that deal with government safety probes, recalls and regulations. The reach of these former agency employees is broad. Their names appear on rosters for every major automaker, every automotive trade group and as expert witnesses and legal counsel for the industry in class-action lawsuits. Read Article
BBC – Up to half the food aid in Somalia is diverted to corrupt contractors, local UN workers and Islamist militants, a leaked UN report says. The report, by the UN monitoring group in Somalia, is particularly critical of the UN’s own World Food Programme and recommends an independent inquiry. It says WFP contracts are awarded to a few powerful individuals who operate cartels that sell the food illegally. The report has not been made public yet, but its contents have been leaked. Read article
Weekly Standard – It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. Read Article
Business Insider – Is your nation under massive financial pressure due to deteriorating sovereign debt ratings?
Rising interest costs got you down? Rather than having to actually tackle your mounting debt problems, here’s an innovative solution from some Eurozone finance ministers — create your own, friendlier credit ratings. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Some of America’s top ”warmist” scientists, demoralised at how their faith is being discredited, are planning a counter-attack on the “climate sceptics”, according to the Washington Times. “We’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” says Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. As for “well-funded”, a new study by Jo Nova suggests that, in the US alone, the $79 billion (£52bn) of state funding for pro-warming research in the past 20 years outweighs the money given to climate sceptics by 3,500 to one. As for Prof Ehrlich, he is best known for his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb which, as well as catastrophic climate change, predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s. He also forecast that by 1980 the average age of death in the US would be 42, due to pesticides. Sounds like just the man to restore our faith in true “science”. Read Article
Telegraph – Heydar Aliyev, the son of Ilham Aliyev, the oil-rich country’s president, allegedly spent almost £30 million (US$44 million) on nine waterfront mansions in the southern Gulf emirate earlier this year, reports said. The boy, who was 11 at the time, made the purchase in the Palm Jumeirah development over two weeks, the Washington Post reported on Friday. Heydar’s name and his date of birth appeared on Dubai Land Department records, which were obtained by the paper. The details listed on the property records were the same as those of the son of the former Soviet Republic’s president, whose annual salary is about £150,000 ($228,000). Read article
Washington Times – Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics. In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of “being treated like political pawns” and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times. “Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails. Some scientists question the tactic and say they should focus instead on perfecting their science, but the researchers who are organizing the effort say the political battle is eroding confidence in their work. Read Article
Ed – The question is who is better funded? Those who are supported by vested interests in the oil industry, or those who are supported by vested interests in Governments and the banking industry? Who needs rational debate & science anyway when there is money to be made?
Forbes – Just when we thought that–finally–we wouldn’t have Al Gore to kick around any more, he resurfaces with a characteristically apocalyptic, know-it-all New York Times op-ed about global warming, “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.” How awful a calamity? “The displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.” Sounds almost as bad as a Gore presidency Read Article
BBC – Millions of dollars in Western aid for victims of the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 was siphoned off by rebels to buy weapons, a BBC investigation finds. Former rebel leaders told the BBC that they posed as merchants in meetings with charity workers to get aid money. They used the cash to fund attempts to overthrow the government of the time. One rebel leader estimated $95m (£63m) – from Western governments and charities including Band Aid – was channelled into the rebel fight. Read article
Guardian – A senior Iraqi spy has accused the prime minister, Nour al-Maliki, of handing out thousands of guns to tribal leaders in a bid to win votes. The claim was made by Iraqi National Intelligence Service former spokesman, Saad al-Alusi, a week before Iraq’s general election, in which allegations of vote buying and exorbitant handouts have become widespread. Read article
Times of India – Opposition leader Manohar Parrikar has lambasted the state government, alleging that it is abetting deforestation even as rampant illegal mining continues. “For the past three years alone, 1,500 hectares of forest land has been converted to mining land. The forest department should be renamed as the de-forestation department,” Parrikar told the media at a press conference here on Thursday. “From statistics made available to me, about 18 to 22 per cent of iron ore exported from the state is being extracted from illegal mines. Goa is currently exporting 43 million tonnes of iron ore, which is double to the quantity of exports in 2005. The government is unable to give an account of the source of ore for more than 33 million tonnes,” Parrikar said. He also said that chief minister Digambar Kamat should be made accountable for growing illegalities in the mining sector. Read Article
Daily Mail - Scientists at the heart of the Climategate row were yesterday accused by a leading academic body of undermining science’s credibility. The Institute of Physics said ‘worrying implications’ had been raised after it was revealed the University of East Anglia had manipulated data on global warming. The rebuke – the strongest yet from the scientific community – came as Professor Phil Jones, the researcher at the heart of the scandal, told MPs he had written ’some pretty awful emails’ – but denied trying to suppress data. Read Article
The Times – The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails has been accused of making a misleading statement to Parliament. The University of East Anglia wrote this week to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee giving the impression that it had been exonerated by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). However, the university failed to disclose that the ICO had expressed serious concerns that one of its professors had proposed deleting information to avoid complying with the Freedom of Information Act. Read Article
BBC – Ten of thousands of Italians have demonstrated in Rome against Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, over what they say are attempts to evade justice. Mr Berlusconi is on trial in two corruption cases. But legislation being discussed in parliament would in effect stop him going to court. Read article
The Times – THE government’s chief scientist and his wife have made £500,000 in the past year in a company overseeing commercial fishing that allegedly threatens one of the world’s most pristine marine environments. Professor John Beddington and his wife, Caroline, are joint shareholders in Marine Resources Assessment Group (MRAG), a London-based consultancy that manages fisheries and provides specialist advice around the world. Conservationists claim that a fishery managed by the company in British territorial waters in the Indian Ocean has been catching threatened species including blue sharks and manta rays. It is estimated that between 2003 and 2008 more than 120,000 were caught as “bycatch” from commercial tuna fishing. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – And it never was about the science, as Sam at Climatequotes.com (”remembering what they will want us to forget”) reminds us with this useful little delve into the Government archives. He shows how in 2003 the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) deliberately set out to mislead the public about the dangers of “Climate Change”. Among the “experts” DEFRA invited to help talk up the threat were our old friends at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). What DEFRA was (and indeed, still is) after was “headline indicators” – ie scary scenarios with which to terrify the public into supine acceptance of the government’s high-tax, high-regulation green agenda. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Staff at the Met Office were awarded more than £12 million in bonuses in the last five years, it has been disclosed.The performance-related payout comes despite repeated criticism of the national weather service. Forecasters were lambasted after their predictions of a barbeque summer turned into a washout. This was followed by forecasts of a mild winter which has turned out to be one of the coldest on record. The Met Office could be dropped by the BBC for the first time in 90 years when its contract expires in April. Read Article
Ed – Bearing in mind the UK Government is making billions in tax revenues from carbon taxing and the vilification of CO2, do you think that it is feasible to consider the possibility that staff would have found the bonuses less forthcoming had they not towed the anthropogenic global warming line, despite the fact that there has been no statistical warming since 1995?
© Unknown
Washington Independent – Employees of the CIA-connected private security corporation Blackwater diverted hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles, from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan intended to equip Afghan policemen, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee. On at least one occasion, an individual claiming to work for the company evidently signed for a weapons shipment using the name of a “South Park” cartoon character. And Blackwater has yet to return hundreds of the guns to the military. Read article
Daily Telegraph – Corus’ steelworks at Redcar, near Middlesbrough, “Teesside Cast Products”, is to be closed (”mothballed” is the euphemism). It is Britain’s last great steelworks and an essential national resource. Without it, we are at the world’s mercy. Corus is owned by Tata Steel of India. Recently, Tata received “EU-carbon-credits” worth up to £1bn, ostensibly so that steel-production at Redcar would not be crippled by the EU’s “carbon-emissions-trading-scheme”. By closing the plant at Redcar – and not making any “carbon-emissions” – Tata walks off with £1bn of taxpayers’ money, which it will invest in its steel-factories in India, where there is no “carbon-emissions-trading-scheme”. There’s more. The EU’s “emissions-trading-scheme” (ETS) is modelled on instructions from the “International Panel on Climate-Change” (IPCC) of the United Nations Organisation. The Chairman of the IPCC is one Dr Rajendra K.Pachauri, a former railway-engineer, who obtained this post by virtue of his being Chairman of the “Tata Energy-Research Institute” – set up by Tata Steel. Read Article
CNS News – Fifteen years with no statistically significant increase in global temperatures does not mean that the human race is not causing the climate to change, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told CNSNews.com on Tuesday. Jackson reasserted her faith in manmade global warming in response to a question from CNSNews.com asking if she agreed with the recent statement by prominent climate scientist Phil Jones that there had been no statistically significant global warming since 1995. Jackson also said “we need to move aggressively” to pass energy regulation legislation. Read Article
Ed – Oops the sky isn’t falling in, however we’d better not let that stop us creating a $3 trillion a year bank enriching carbon trading scheme
