1/30/09 More News

TOKYO, Japan (CNN) -- Sony blamed the global economic slowdown, increased competition and an appreciating yen for a 95 percent drop in third-quarter profits, as the company announced its results Thursday.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/01/29/sony.loss/index.html

Did they say a 95% drop in profit?

The crisis facing banks was sharply underlined today when Russia's second-biggest bank admitted in Davos that it was seeking a bailout and Germany indicated that it was coming round to the idea of "bad banks" to hive off toxic debt.

Russian banks have been badly hit by the global economic crisis, which has hammered the country’s stock, bond and currency markets. A number of its smaller banks have already failed, and some of its biggest lenders may need capital injections.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/wef/article5610807.ece

The banking crisis is the fault of capitalism?

"The NSA never alerted any other agency that the terrorists were in the United States and moving across the country towards Washington," Bamford told PBS.

PBS also found that "the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into NSA's role in the broad intelligence breakdown behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. If they had, they would have understood the full extent to which the agency had major pieces of the puzzle but never put them together or disclosed their entire body of knowledge to the CIA and the FBI."

Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer told PBS, "None of this information that we're speaking about this evening's in the 9/11 Commission report. They simply ignored all of it."

Not only was then-Director Michael Hayden never held accountable for the NSA's alleged failure, but he went on to oversee the Bush administration's vast expansion of domestic surveillance. In 2006, he was appointed as director of the CIA.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/PBS_NSA_tracked_911_hijackers_but_0127.html

Promoted for screwing up?

Highlights of the $819 billion economic recovery plan approved by the House and drafted by House Democrats and President Barack Obama's economic team. Additional debt costs would add $347 billion over 10 years. Many provisions expire in two years.
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/politics&id=6629872

How's that for a return? Cost us $347 billion in interest to get $819 billion stimulus...or total cost of $1,166 billion! Too bad its only a dent in the problem.

"The contract is finished and will be not be renewed by order of the minister of the interior," interior ministry spokesman Major General Abdel Karim Khalaf told AFP.

Blackwater, a major State Department contractor in Iraq, is being expelled over the deaths of the Iraqi civilians at a busy Baghdad intersection on September 16, 2007, in a case that infuriated Iraqis, Khalaf said.

"It is because of the shooting incident in 2007," he said.

An Iraqi investigation found that 17 civilians were killed and 20 injured in the incident, in which Blackwater guards opened fire while escorting an American diplomatic convoy through Baghdad. The firm says its guards were acting in self-defence.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090129/twl-iraq-ends-licence-of-us-security-fir-2802f3e.html

Its Blackwater...you can't kick them out. They are spooks...they'll just come back under another guise.

The short, eye-opening eBook linked below is titled Aluminum in Vaccines -- a Neurological Gamble, by Neil Miller, director of the Thinktwice Global Vaccine Institute. It documents the hazards associated with aluminum-laden vaccines. Children are receiving high concentrations of aluminum in their shots. This well-documented neurotoxin may be more dangerous than mercury.

Vaccines containing high concentrations of neurotoxic aluminum were added to the child immunization schedule when several vaccines containing mercury were removed. Two-month old babies now receive 1,225 mcg of aluminum from their vaccines -- 50 times higher than safety levels! Although the FDA, CDC and World Health Organization are aware of the dangers, they expect parents to play Russian roulette with their children.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/01/27/mercury-in-vaccines-was-replaced-with-something-even-more-toxic.aspx

Out with the mercury and in with the aluminum!

Jan 26 (Reuters) - Lending at many of the largest U.S. banks fell in recent months, the Wall Street Journal said, citing an analysis of banks that recently announced their quarterly results.

Ten of the 13 big beneficiaries of the U.S. Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), saw their outstanding loan balances decline by a total of about $46 billion, or 1.4 percent, between the third and fourth quarters of 2008, according to the paper.

Those 13 banks have collected the lion's share of the roughly $200 billion the government has doled out since TARP was launched last October to stabilize financial institutions, the paper said.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/marketsNewsUS/idUKBNG15229820090126

So the banks getting bail out money are curbing spending while the ones who didn't continue to walk off the cliff?

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Halliburton Co will pay a $559 million fine to end an investigation of its former KBR Inc unit if the U.S. government approves the settlement, the largest penalty against a U.S. company for charges of bribery under federal law.

Under the settlement, Halliburton would pay $382 million to the Department of Justice and $177 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission in "disgorgement."
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE50P5ZE20090126

More bribery to pay for the bribery?

ANOTHER RUSSIAN fighting for human rights and the rule of law has been murdered in Vladimir Putin's Moscow. Stanislav Markelov, a lawyer who defended Chechens brutalized by Russian troops and journalists who wrote about the abuses, was shot in the head yesterday by a masked man carrying a silencer-equipped pistol. An opposition journalist who tried to intervene, Anastasia Baburova, was also fatally shot in the head. This occurred in broad daylight, on a busy street in central Moscow less than half a mile from the Kremlin. It was another demonstration that assassinations are a dominating feature of political life under Mr. Putin's regime.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/19/AR2009011902604.html

So much for the cover of darkness!