Foreclosures Rise; Repossessions Set Record

US foreclosure activity rose in August from the previous month, and banks and lenders took ownership from homeowners at a record pace, according to a new report released Thursday.

Bank repossessions, often the final step in the foreclosure process after a home fails to sell at auction, increased about 3 percent from the month before to 95,364, a record high. At the same time the number of properties that received default notices—the first step in the foreclosure process—decreased 1 percent from a month ago and fell 30 percent from a year ago, a sign that lenders are focusing on their backlog of foreclosure inventory before tackling new distressed loans, according to foreclosure listing website RealtyTrac, which released the report.

Overall, foreclosure fillings rose 4.18 percent in August from the previous month, and were down 5.48 percent from a year ago. In all, 338,836 properties were in the foreclosure process. One in 381 U.S. households received a foreclosure notice in August. (Foreclosure notices are defined as a default notice, auction sale notice or bank repossession.)

“There is a buildup in delinquent loans that are not in foreclosure,” said Rick Sharga, senior vice president of RealtyTrac, adding that banks and lenders are slowing the process to avoid a drop in home prices. “It’s a managed slowdown more than anything else,” he said.

“The underlining conditions haven’t improved,” Sharga added, referring to high unemployment and falling home prices in certain markets.

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Bill would force U.S. lawmakers to disclose owed taxes, have wages garnished

As senators debate tax legislation this month, Sen. Tom Coburn wants to make sure that senators themselves are paying taxes.

Coburn (R-Okla.) introduced legislation Wednesday night that would require U.S. lawmakers to disclose any money they owe in delinquent taxes and to have their wages garnished until the debt is paid.

"Taxpayers are fed up with those in Washington living under a different set of rules than the rest of America," Coburn said in a statement entered into the Congressional Record. "At a time when Congress may allow taxes to increase on some or even all Americans, Congress should not expect other Americans to pay more taxes when they are not even paying the taxes they owe under the rates they set themselves."

The Washington Post reported last week that workers in the House and Senate, possibly including lawmakers, owe an increasing amount to the federal government. The amount has risen 37 percent in two years, reaching $9.3 million last year, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service.

That's a small sliver of the $1 billion owed by all federal workers, but the amount owed by Congress's 18,000 workers has risen faster than the overall delinquent debt on the government's books. The total does not include debt that's already on an installment plan.

Coburn's legislation would require lawmakers to include back taxes owed on their annual financial disclosure statements, and trigger an automatic ethics investigation of any member who reports a tax debt.

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PopSci Investigation: What Kind Of Top-Secret Assassination Tech Does $58 Billion Buy?

Every year, tens of billions of Pentagon dollars go missing. The money vanishes not because of fraud, waste or abuse, but because U.S. military planners have appropriated it to secretly develop advanced weapons and fund clandestine operations. Next year, this so-called black budget will be even larger than it was in the Cold War days of1987, when the leading black-budget watchdog, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), began gathering reliable estimates. The current total is staggering: $58 billion—enough to pay for two complete Manhattan Projects.

Where does the money go? Tracking the black budget has always been a challenge. Constantly shifting project names that seem to be randomly generated by computers—Tractor Cage, Tractor Card, Tractor Dirt, Tractor Hike and Tractor Hip are all real examples—make linking dollar amounts to technologies impossible for outsiders. But there are clues.

According to Todd Harrison, an analyst at the CSBA, the allocations for classified operations in the 2011 federal budget include $19.4 billion for research and development across all four branches of the military (funding for the CIA, including its drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is contained within the Defense Department black budget), another $16.9 billion for procurement, and $14.6 billion for “operations and maintenance.” This latter category, Harrison notes, has been expanding quickly. This may suggest that many classified technologies are now moving from the laboratory to the battlefield.

In fact, the rise in classified defense spending accompanies a fundamental change in American military strategy. After the attacks of September 11, the Pentagon began a shift away from its late Cold War–era “two-war strategy,” premised on maintaining the ability to conduct two major military operations simultaneously, and began to focus instead on irregular warfare against individuals and groups.

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A 1996 Federal Budget Amendment Darkens the Future of Embryonic Stem Cell Research

SCIAM

Human embryonic stem cells can live on indefinitely when carefully cultured under just the right conditions. The legal and legislative environments for these cell lines, however, has gotten a lot less hospitable in recent weeks.

After a federal judge placed an injunction on federal funding for all human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research in late August scientists and advocates faced rules that were far more stringent than those under the George W. Bush administration. A temporary lift of the injunction, issued September 9 by a federal appeals court, has done little to solidify the field's future.

The fate of many projects now hangs on language in a congressional budget amendment that was passed years before the first human embryonic stem cell was isolated.

The legislation in question, the 1996 Dickey–Wicker Amendment, prohibits federal funds from being used for any work that would harm or destroy a human embryo. Rather than being voted on annually, the amendment is attached to a slew of other National Institutes of Health (NIH) legislation and gets renewed as part of a batch.

Under Dickey–Wicker, President Bush allowed federal funding for research only on stem cell lines that had already been derived (but prevented the government from backing the further destruction of any embryos). And President Barack Obama pushed the amendment's limitations by asking the NIH in 2009 to allocate funds for still more lines of cells.

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Anti-American Protest in Kabul Turns Violent

KABUL—One of the largest anti-American protests in years turned deadly in Kabul Wednesday, with as many as five protesters reported shot dead by police and a neighborhood shut down by rioting.

The demonstration started after a local mullah, or Islamic preacher, gathered a crowd at about 6 a.m. on the eastern outskirts of Kabul to denounce the reported burnings of Korans in the U.S.

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Americans Growing More Fearful of Their Finances

CNBC

Looking for more evidence that stock market volatility and economic uncertainty are taking a toll on consumer confidence?

Well, you might just take a look at a gauge from Principal Financial Group which says more Americans are reporting concerns about their long-term financial future—driving this component of Principal's Well-Being Index to its highest level since the third quarter of 2005.

Seventy-five percent of workers and 61 percent of retirees said they were concerned about the future of their finances.

In addition, a third of workers and 22 percent of retirees said their stress level related to their personal financial situation is much higher than at the same time last year.

Their outlook for the future has also darkened, with about two out of five workers and retirees thinking the economy will worsen to some extent over the next year. That's worse than in the second quarter of 2010, when about 24 percent of workers and 16 percent of retirees felt that way.

"What I think we're seeing is that financial concerns continued to persist and there is a sense that the recovery will be longer than people had hoped," said Luke Vandermillen, vice president of retirement and investor services at Principal.

What's encouraging is these concerns have not forced consumers into a catatonic state, it's at least providing consumers with the motivation to act, Vandermillen said.

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Home Price Double Dip Begins

The trouble with many of the "indicators" we report is that some are pretty current and others are severely lagging. Home sales are generally the former and home prices the latter.

That's why, given the combination of the expiration of the home buyer tax credit and the increasing number of loans moving to final foreclosure, we knew that home prices overall would take a hit, but it would take a while.

Well we're here.

Two new reports out today prove the consequences of oversupply of organic inventory (12.5 months on existing homes in July according to the National Association of Realtors) and the shadow inventory of foreclosed properties (estimates vary widely and wildly). CoreLogic's Home Price Index shows home prices "flat" in July as transaction volume continues to decline. "This was the first time in five months that no year-over-year gains were reported," according to the release. In June, prices were up 2.4 percent year over year. In addition, "36 states experienced price declines in July, twice the number in May and the highest number since last November when prices nationally were still declining."

And there's the rub.

Prices have been recovering since last Fall, largely thanks to the artificial stimulus of the $8000/$6500 home buyer tax credit. But prices were also benefiting from a slight bump in confidence in the housing market, fed by an apparent drop in the foreclosure numbers. In reality, the foreclosure numbers were dropping only because banks and states were delaying the process, as they tried to cram as many borrowers as possible into what we now know is a largely unsuccessful government-backed mortgage modification program.

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DHS: Lawsuit planned after protesters put on terror list

Pittsburgh Live

An activist who believes he was improperly included on a state terror threat list said this morning he is preparing a federal lawsuit.

"When people's civil rights are trampled it's a federal issue," said Gene Stilp of Harrisburg, who holds a Virginia law license but does not practice as an attorney.

Gov. Ed Rendell, speaking Downtown this morning, said he does not believe activists' Constitutional rights were violated.

The statement was a reversal from what he said yesterday. Asked in Harrisburg on Tuesday whether monitoring activists was "tantamount to trampling" on their Constitutional rights, he said: "I would say so."

Rendell said he is "deeply embarrassed" by the disclosure that state Homeland Security officials included information about protesters on what was supposed to be a list of possible terrorist threats.

"Being embarrassed doesn't cut it," Stilp said.

The list, which included information on public hearings that opponents of Marcellus gas drilling might attend, was sent to drilling companies.

Stilp said he believes he was among those monitored, based on Rendell's comment that a 25-foot inflatable "pink pig" Stilp takes to rallies was included in the monitoring.

"The pig! They were after the pig," Rendell said Tuesday. "That pig is what makes Harrisburg a very special place."

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TSA: Arrestee's genitalia was exposed by "full body" device

Smoking Gun

The airport screener arrested for assaulting a coworker who taunted him about the size of his penis after his genitalia was exposed by a full-body scanner told police that he snapped after being subjected to “psychological torture” by fellow Transportation Security Administration employees who repeatedly asked him, “What size are you?”

In a handwritten statement given to cops following his May arrest, Rolando Negrin, 45, described the fallout after he walked through a high-tech "whole body image" scanner during a training session for TSA workers at Miami International Airport. Negrin’s statement to Miami-Dade Police Department officers, excerpted here, was obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. The original police report detailing the incident can be found here.

Negrin wrote that, despite his pleas, coworkers would not cease mocking him after the scanner gave them a revealing look at his genitalia. He recalled that he was mockingly asked, “Roly, what size are you?” Coworkers, he added, called him “little angry man,” laughed off his pleas for compassion, and abused him in front of passengers.

The merciless teasing and “psychological torture,” Negrin stated, left him stressed out and with elevated blood pressure. When he confronted his chief tormentor, Negrin said the man laughed at him. Negrin, pictured in the above mug shot, later allegedly attacked fellow TSA screener Hugo Osorno in an airport parking lot, striking him with a police baton while demanding an apology.

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Real IRA says it will target UK bankers

Banks and bankers are now potential targets for the Real IRA, leaders of the dissident republican terror group have warned in an exclusive interview with the Guardian. Despite having only 100 activists they also said that targets in England remained a high priority.

In an attempt to tap into the intense hostility towards the banks on both sides of the Irish border they branded bankers as "criminals" and said: "We have a track record of attacking high-profile economic targets and financial institutions such as the City of London. The role of bankers and the institutions they serve in financing Britain's colonial and capitalist system has not gone unnoticed.

"Let's not forget that the bankers are the next-door neighbours of the politicians. Most people can see the picture: the bankers grease the politicians' palms, the politicians bail out the bankers with public funds, the bankers pay themselves fat bonuses and loan the money back to the public with interest. It's essentially a crime spree that benefits a social elite at the expense of many millions of victims."

But security sources in Northern Ireland point out say the Real IRA lacks the logistical resources of the Provisional IRA to prosecute a bombing campaign similar to the ones that devastated the City of London in the early 1990s or the Canary Wharf bomb in 1996. Although the Real IRA has access to explosives it has yet to carry out large-scale bombings.

The terror group stressed in a series of written answers to the Guardian's questions that future attacks would alternate between the "military, political and economic targets". It is the first time the Real IRA has engaged in such open anti-capitalist rhetoric or focused on the role of the banking system.

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'Goldman Conspiracy' helps China defeat U.S.

Market Watch

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Goldman's "ultimate goal is hunting and killing China," warns Li Delin, the Chinese author of "The Goldman Sachs Conspiracy," a bestseller in China.

Li is not as visually dramatic as Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone picture of Goldman as a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." But Li's Chinese readers love his "Goldman Sachs knows when to go for your neck" like a "Manchurian tiger."

But is the Goldman Conspiracy really a threat to China? That's a joke, right?

It's the exact opposite. In fact, it should be obvious that China is actually a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of Goldman, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like Goldman's capital, talent and connections."

Then, eventually, in a generation, by 2040, China will suck the life out of Goldman. At the same time, back here stateside, China must be quietly cheering as America's "bloodsucking vampire squid" sucks the life out of our capitalism and democracy, as the Goldman Conspiracy's insatiable greed aggressively sabotages America from within.

Get it? China is very effectively using the out-of-control Goldman Conspiracy greed machine as a vital weapon in China's two-pronged global strategy against America, over in China and back here in America. And tragically, Goldman's insatiable greed is so blinding that Goldman has lost the ability to see the long-term consequences of its sad un-American behavior.

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French senate approves burqa ban

CNN

The French senate approved Tuesday a law banning any veils that cover the face -- including the burqa, the full-body covering worn by some Muslim women -- making France the first European country to plan such a measure.

The law passed by a vote of 246 to 1, with about 100 abstentions coming essentially from left-leaning politicians.

The legislation was overwhelmingly approved by the lower house of parliament in July and will go into effect next spring.

French people back the ban by a margin of more than four to one, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found in a survey earlier this year.

Some 82 percent of people polled approved of a ban, while 17 percent disapproved. That was the widest support the Washington-based think tank found in any of the five countries it surveyed.

Clear majorities also backed burqa bans in Germany, Britain and Spain, while two out of three Americans opposed it, the survey found.

A panel of French lawmakers recommended a ban last year, and lawmakers unanimously passed a non-binding resolution in May calling the full-face veil contrary to the laws of the nation.

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Photographer Ernest Withers doubled as FBI informant to spy on civil rights movement

At the top of the stairs he saw the blood, a large pool of it, splashed across the balcony like a grisly, abstract painting. Instinctively, Ernest Withers raised his camera. This wasn't just a murder. This was history.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood here a few hours earlier chatting with aides when a sniper squeezed off a shot from a hunting rifle.

Now, as night set over Memphis, Withers was on the story.

Slipping past a police barricade, the enterprising Beale Street newsman made his way to room 306 at the Lorraine Motel -- King's room -- and walked in. Ralph Abernathy and the others hardly blinked. After all, this was Ernest C. Withers. He'd marched with King, and sat in on some of the movement's sensitive strategy meetings.

A veteran freelancer for America's black press, Withers was known as "the original civil rights photographer," an insider who'd covered it all, from the Emmett Till murder that jump-started the movement in 1955 to the Little Rock school crisis, the integration of Ole Miss and, now, the 1968 sanitation strike that brought King to Memphis and his death.

As other journalists languished in the Lorraine courtyard, Withers' camera captured the scene:

Bernard Lee, tie undone, looking weary yet fiery.

Andrew Young raising his palm to keep order.

Ben Hooks and Harold Middlebrook gazing pensively as King's briefcase sits nearby, opened, as if awaiting his return.

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WTC 1 and 2: Justice and 9/11 Demands Accountability. Forensic Evidence Indicates Presence of Controlled Demolition Material

by Dick Gregory

It was so painful for me as my wife Lil and I watched the events of September 11, 2001 on television. Seeing a plane hit the World Trade Center (WTC) North Tower at 8:46, then a second plane hit the South Tower at 9:02. Shortly, we saw the firefighters and other first responders courageously going into the buildings hoping to extinguish the fires, but it was impossible to foresee what followed.

Then we watched in shock as nearly a dozen people were jumping from the upper floors to their deaths.

We felt profound horror at 9:59 as the South Tower cascaded in freefall into its own footprint, and then 29 minutes later when the North Tower came down in the same impossible freefall way.

The new forensic evidence which is being released today by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth demonstrates the presence of controlled demolition materiel in the World Trade Center buildings One and Two.

Just one week after September 11, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Christine Todd Whitman declared “I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington DC that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink” and that we “. . . need not be concerned about environmental issues as [we return to [our] homes and workplaces”.

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Veterans Agency Made Secret Deal With Prudential

Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs failed to inform 6 million soldiers and their families of an agreement enabling Prudential Financial Inc. to withhold lump-sum payments of life insurance benefits for survivors of fallen service members, according to records made public through a Freedom of Information request.

The amendment to Prudential’s contract is the first document to show how VA officials sanctioned a payment practice that has spurred investigations by lawmakers and regulators. Since 1999, Prudential has used so-called retained-asset accounts, which allow the company to withhold lump sum payments due to survivors and earn investment income on the money for itself.

The Sept. 1, 2009, amendment to Prudential’s contract with the VA ratified another unpublicized deal that had been struck between the insurer and the government 10 years earlier -- one that was never put into writing, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue. This verbal agreement in 1999 provoked concern among top insurance officials of the agency, the documents released in the FOIA request show.

For a decade, until the contract was formally changed, Prudential wasn’t fulfilling its obligations to survivors of fallen service members, says Brendan Bridgeland, an insurance lawyer who runs the non-profit Center for Insurance Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

‘Violated Terms’

“It’s very clear they violated the original terms of the contract,” says Bridgeland, who is retained by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to represent consumers.

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Prof. says DHS confiscated samples and NOTES with inside info on dispersant

Superbugs: An infectious-disease nightmare is unfolding

BOSTON – An infectious-disease nightmare is unfolding: Bacteria that have been made resistant to nearly all antibiotics by an alarming new gene have sickened people in three states and are popping up all over the world, health officials reported Monday.

The U.S. cases and two others in Canada all involve people who had recently received medical care in India, where the problem is widespread. A British medical journal revealed the risk last month in an article describing dozens of cases in Britain in people who had gone to India for medical procedures.

How many deaths the gene may have caused is unknown; there is no central tracking of such cases. So far, the gene has mostly been found in bacteria that cause gut or urinary infections.

Scientists have long feared this — a very adaptable gene that hitches onto many types of common germs and confers broad drug resistance, creating dangerous "superbugs."

"It's a great concern," because drug resistance has been rising and few new antibiotics are in development, said Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, director of infectious diseases at the University of Melbourne in Australia. "It's just a matter of time" until the gene spreads more widely person-to-person, he said.

Grayson heads an American Society for Microbiology conference in Boston, which was buzzing with reports of the gene, called NDM-1 and named for New Delhi.

The U.S. cases occurred this year in people from California, Massachusetts and Illinois, said Brandi Limbago, a lab chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three types of bacteria were involved, and three different mechanisms let the gene become part of them.

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Al Qaeda in Iraq rises again

LA Times

Reporting from Jarf Sakhr, Iraq —

Sheik Sabah Janabi wears a painful-looking metal brace on his left hand, its rods pressing into the puffy flesh like the spring on a mousetrap. He fumbles a Marlboro from a pack with his good hand, sucks in the smoke and frowns.

In this farming town that was a center of extremism when Iraq fell into its nihilistic civil war, Janabi sits in a darkened room, his white shirt half tucked in and his blue tie slightly askew. He talks about how gunmen tried to kill him three months ago and describes himself as a leader under siege.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is back from the dead.

Once vanquished by Janabi and other Sunni Arab fighters who joined the U.S.-backed Awakening movement, the Islamic militant group is carving out new sanctuaries here in the farmlands south of Baghdad, in the deserts to the west and in the mountains to the east.

Almost weekly, suicide bombers wage war in the Iraqi capital. Tribal leaders, local officials and some U.S. officers worry that Al Qaeda in Iraq has successfully exploited the country's six-month political vacuum and anger over arrests of Awakening members in Sunni areas to establish its new foothold.

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Stop The Islamophobia! Islam Accepts All Religions!

Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in God and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.

[Qur'an 2:62]

Afghanistan: Deep corruption of the ruling elite

NY Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — In early 2009, as President Hamid Karzai scanned the landscape for potential partners to run in his re-election bid, he was approached from an unusual corner: a bank.

The president’s brother, Mahmoud, and another Afghan businessman, Haseen Fahim, were shareholders in Kabul Bank, one of the freewheeling financial institutions that had sprung up over the past decade since the Taliban’s fall.

According to Afghan officials and businessmen in Kabul, Mahmoud Karzai and Mr. Fahim recommended Mr. Fahim’s brother, Gen. Muhammad Qasim Fahim, to become the president’s running mate.

President Karzai agreed, and in a stroke co-opted his ethnic Tajik opposition and placated an old political foe with a checkered record on human rights and corruption. After the deal, Kabul Bank poured millions into Mr. Karzai’s re-election campaign, Afghan officials said. Mahmoud Karzai and Haseen Fahim, drawing on Kabul Bank’s resources, were able to enrich their families aided by tens of millions of dollars in loans.

Now, Kabul Bank sits at the center of a financial crisis that has exposed the shadowy workings of the country’s business and political elite, and how such connections shielded the bank from scrutiny. The panic surrounding Kabul Bank is threatening to pull down the Afghan banking system and has drawn in the United States. And it is driving a wedge between the Fahims and the Karzais, the two Afghan political families that benefited most. Now, the financial-familial arrangement is teetering on the edge of collapse.

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