Archive for February, 2009
Arsonists Torch Berlin Porsches, BMWs on Economic Woe
February 28th, 2009Via: Bloomberg: When Berlin resident Simone Klostermann returned from vacation and couldn’t find her Mercedes SLK, she thought it had been towed. Police told her the 35,000- euro ($45,000) car had been torched. “They’d squirted something flammable into the car’s engine block in the gap between the windshield and the hood,” said Klostermann. “The engine […]
New York: Apartment Buyers Abandoning 6-Figure Deposits
February 28th, 2009Via: New York Times: At 304 Spring Street, a sleek condominium building in SoHo with stunning Hudson River views, the buyer for the duplex penthouse recently decided he would not go through with the deal and walked away from a $780,000 deposit. At 1120 Park Avenue, a classic prewar co-op filled with multimillion-dollar apartments, it […]
Schwarzenegger Declares California Drought Emergency
February 28th, 2009Via: AP: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency Friday because of three years of below-average rain and snowfall in California, a step that urges urban water agencies to reduce water use by 20 percent. “This drought is having a devastating impact on our people, our communities, our economy and our environment, making today’s […]
FDIC Raising Fees on Banks, Adds Emergency Fee
February 27th, 2009Via: AP: Facing a cascade of bank failures depleting the deposit insurance fund, federal regulators on Friday raised the fees paid by U.S. financial institutions and levied an emergency premium in a bid to collect $27 billion this year. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. now expects that bank failures will cost the insurance fund around […]
Senate Panel to Examine CIA Detainee Handling
February 27th, 2009Ahh yes, from the people who fed you box cutters and Building 7: The Authoritative Account of Bush’s Atrocities… Give me a f*cking break already. Via: Washington Post: The Senate intelligence committee is planning an unprecedented review of the CIA’s handling of captured terrorist suspects, drawing back the curtain for the first time on the […]
U.S. Economy Suffers Sharp Nosedive
February 27th, 2009Via: BBC: The US economy shrank by 6.2% in the last three months of 2008, official figures have shown, a far sharper fall than had previously been reported. Plunging exports and the biggest fall in consumer spending in 28 years dragged the figure down from the 3.8% estimate the government gave earlier. The decline was […]
More Seeds for ‘Doomsday Vault’
February 27th, 2009Via: BBC: Almost 90,000 food crop seed samples have arrived at the “doomsday vault” in the Arctic Circle, as part of its first anniversary celebrations. The four-tonne shipment takes the number of seeds stored in the frozen repository to more than 20 million. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built 130m (426ft) inside a mountain, aims […]
Wikileaks Cracks NATO’s Master Narrative for Afghanistan
February 27th, 2009It appears that Wikileaks is distributing NATO classified documents that some imbecile at CENTCOM left on an open webshare. The Wikileaks people ran a dictionary attack on the files and found the password on them was progress. Via: Wikileaks: Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The […]
Dear Mr. President, With All Due Respect
February 27th, 2009Via: Mish: Dear Mr. President, I read your New Era $3.6 Trillion Budget Proposal. I also listened to your speech Tuesday night. You made a great campaign speech. However, the campaign is over. You won. And the reason you won is you offered hope as well as a promise of change. With all due respect […]
California’s Newly Poor Push Social Services to Brink
February 27th, 2009Via: Bloomberg: In California’s Contra Costa County, 40,000 families are applying for just 350 affordable-housing vouchers. Church-operated pantries are running out of food. Crisis calls have more than doubled in the city of Antioch, where the Family Stress Center occupies the site of a former bank. The worst financial crisis in seven decades is forcing […]
