I posted on the original here: But that was then and this is now.
American Thinker has the story.
And a corrected version of the video does not seem to allow an embed.
The music has changed but the ‘tune’ remains the same.
Fannie and Freddie said they received subpoenas Friday from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan as well as requests from the Securities and Exchange Commission that they preserve documents. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the government earlier this month as their mounting defaults and foreclosures threatened the entire mortgage market.
The government investigation focuses on activities starting in 2007, Freddie Mac said in a statement.
Critics have long questioned the companies’ bookkeeping. Last November, for example, a Fortune magazine story said new accounting procedures at Fannie Mae masked potential losses on bad loans.
And several years ago, both Fannie and Freddie were forced to restate billions in earnings after federal regulators discovered accounting irregularities at both companies.
The scandals led to the replacement of the companies’ top executives. Freddie Mac’s former CEO, Gregory Parseghian was ousted in December 2003. Fannie CEO Franklin Raines and chief financial officer Timothy Howard were swept out of office a year later.
How long will it be before there is confidence to invest in America?
Speed cameras - hardly popular anywhere - are a source of particular irritation in Flanders.
More than 1,000 have been installed across the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium, while Wallonia, the French-speaking southern half, has only a handful.
Yet revenue from fines is collected centrally and redistributed. Many Flemish motorists not only resent being caught speeding, but feel they are subsiding freewheeling Walloons in the process.
The speed cameras provide a neat snapshot of Flemish grievances.
On the eve of the Eid, the Muslim holiday celebrating the end of the month-long dawn-to-dusk fasting of Ramadan, Denmark’s Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen defended the publication of the cartoons and repeated that Islam had difficulty accepting core values of freedom and democracy.
Now, of course, if earlier payoffs had not been made this would not have happened. .... And this shipment would have gone through.
US helicopters and warships are circling a hijacked Ukrainian cargo ship loaded with 33 Soviet-designed tanks and other weapons that officials fear could wind up in the hands of al-Qaeda-linked fighters in Somalia, if the pirates are allowed to escape.
Thursday’s seizure of the blue-and-white ship off Somalia, could have dangerous ripple effects across the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
Piracy has become a lucrative criminal racket in Somalia, bringing millions of dollars in ransoms to an impoverished nation.
The pirates aboard the Ukrainian-operated Faina are demanding $20m to release the tanks, rifles and ammunition, along with 21 crew members, one of whom has died.
The ship apparently was destined for Sudan when armed pirates overtook it, likely by alighting from a speedboat and clambering up the side of the ship.
Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz said her office has asked a Venezuelan court to seize property and accounts belonging to Moises Maionica and Carlos Kauffman.
The two are wanted in Venezuela for alleged corruption. They also have been accused in Miami of acting illegally as Venezuelan agents in an alleged scheme to cover up the source of US$800,000 seized in a suitcase in Argentina last year.
Maionica has testified that the Venezuelan government hired him to ensure that the businessman who was carrying the suitcase did not reveal the money’s origin or destination.
U.S. prosecutors say the money was from Venezuela’s state oil company and was intended for the campaign of Argentine President Cristina Fernandez. Both Fernandez and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez deny the allegation.
Insisting that France is not discriminating against Sikhs wearing turbans, President Nicholas Sarkozy on Monday said that he expects the community to respect the customs and traditions of the French people.
“We respect their traditions and customs and I hope they also respect France’s rules,” Sarkozy said in a joint interaction with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who also belongs to the Sikh community, after the India-EU summit.
“We respect Sikhs, their customs, their traditions. They are most welcome to France. But we have rules concerning the neutrality of the civil servants, rules concerning secularism and these rules don’t apply to just Sikhs, they apply to the Muslims, they apply to all on the territory of the French Republic.” Sarkozy said.
Lanao del Norte Representative Abdullah Dimaporo warned of fresh attacks by rogue MILF rebels on civilians in his province when the observance of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ends on Wednesday.
“There’s no information on MILF movement. However, the fact that Bravo (alias of MILF Commander Abdurahman Macapaar) has attacked Lanao del Norte in the past pushes me to assume that if he is not caught, he will attack again and again,” Dimaporo said in a text message.
“I am hoping that the American government will allow the use of their modern equipment so Bravo and his cohorts will be captured,” he added.
And I’m not talking about the past. If in the actual year 1984 someone had told me that the press would, negligently, not cover these kinds of stories, I’d tell them they’re crazy.
A ‘must read’.
Regulators in Britain, Belgium and Iceland swooped in Monday to engineer emergency rescues of three banks with heavy exposure to soured mortgages, echoing moves underway in the United States.
In the latest sign of trouble to hit Europe from the global credit crisis, the Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourg governments announced a partial nationalization of the troubled Belgian-Dutch financial conglomerate Fortis, involving a combined injection of €11.2 billion from the three governments, which take a 49 percent stake.
The reports in the Sana news agency and on state television on Sunday did not name the country but Syria shares borders with three Arab countries - Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan.
The vehicle, packed with 200kg of explosives, was blown up near a Syrian security installation on the southern outskirts of the capital. It was the biggest attack in the country since the 1980s.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Hasan Qashqavi said in his weekly briefing that enriching uranium was Iran’s “right” and that it intended to continue to do so.
He describes as “beyond the law” demands for the suspension of Iran’s uranium enrichment.
The US and Russia on Friday sponsored a new UN resolution reaffirming three previous resolutions that imposed sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt its uranium enrichment program.
It is in this area that Rashid Rauf, the 27-year-old from Birmingham accused of being a key organiser of a notorious plot to blow ten airliners out of the sky was said to have been spotted in March this year – his first sighting since his amazing escape from Pakistani police three months previously. The so-called “liquid bomb” plot was one of the most audacious terrorist conspiracies to be uncovered and led to sweeping security measures at airports around the world. The trial ended with seven men convicted of charges in relation to the plot, with a computer studies student Abdulla Ahmed Ali identified as the ringleader in court. They all face a retrial on more serious charges but the man described by law agencies as the real “mastermind”, Rashid Rauf, remains on the run as Britain’s most wanted terrorist.
Boulder Time