The FHFA disclosed the analysis conducted in 2010 in response to Democrats requests made last week. They asked House oversight committee chair Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., to subpoena the agency since it failed to send the analysis as requested last year.
The United Nations may set up a sex abuse blacklist of countries whose peacekeepers will be banned from UN missions, a top official said after two new cases were reported in Haiti.
Investigations have been launched into “grave allegations of sexual and exploitation abuses,” the UN mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, said in a statement. UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said the cases involved minors.
The new scandal has erupted barely four months after six Uruguayan troops in MINUSTAH were accused of raping a teenage youth. There have also been accusations against peacekeeping missions in Africa.
If you think a Chihuahua doesn’t have much in common with a Rottweiler, you might be on to something.
An ancient dog skull, preserved in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia for 33,000 years, presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication and, together with equally ancient dog remains from a cave in Belgium, indicates that domestication of dogs may have occurred repeatedly in different geographic locations rather than with a single domestication event.
Former John Kerry staffer John Kiriakou arrested for blowing CIA agents’ cover.
Mind you, you wouldn’t know that from the Washington Post’s article on the arrest of John Kiriakou. While the Washington Post – from appearances, somewhat reluctantly – reported that Kiriakou (a former CIA officer and Senate Foreign Affairs staffer) had been arrested for revealing names, operations and investigations to the media back in 2008-2009, the paper completely neglected to mention who Kiriakou ended up working for – which is to say, Senator John Kerry (D, MA). Oddly enough, the Washington Post managed to simultaneous note that “[t]he committee had not been aware of the criminal probe of Kiriakou, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the matter” in its article, while unaccountably mentioning that Kiriakou has been leaking classified information publicly for years – including to the, well, Washington Post.
When Congress voted on Dec. 23 to fund a temporary extension of the payroll-tax holiday in part by requiring Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac (FMCC) to increase their fees, it effectively ended the fiction that the two mortgage-financing giants are part of the private sector.
When Fannie and Freddie—known as government-sponsored enterprises—were put in conservatorship as their finances deteriorated in September 2008, officials didn’t put them on the budget. Adding their roughly $1.5 trillion in debt and $3.5 trillion in mortgage guarantees to the gross U.S. debt might have raised questions about the country’s financial stability and exacerbated the financial crisis then under way (even though the $5 trillion of liabilities were matched by nearly as much in assets). And conservatorship was only intended to be temporary.
Raines first plunged Fannie into the subprime abyss as its chairman and chief executive from 1999 to 2005 while cooking the mortgage giant’s books to score fatter bonuses for himself and other Democrats on its board.
In its complaint against Fannie, however, the Obama administration covers only the period from 2006 to 2008 and names Raines’ successor and former protege, Daniel Mudd, as the main defendant. Raines is nowhere to be found in the SEC’s 60-page court filing.
They’ll stop smoking and stay alive longer. And then take much longer to die.
According to David E. Sullivan, general counsel for the state Executive Office of Administration and Finance, Patrick will propose raising the cigarette tax to $3.01 a pack, up from the current $2.51 a pack. Patrick will include the proposed 20 percent increase in his state budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1.
“We need to pay for the somewhat late-breaking court decision,” Sullivan said. “This will help pay the cost of that.”
A British airline pilot arrested over an alleged terrorist plot is claiming racial and religious discrimination after losing his job.
Because of draconian reporting restrictions imposed last week by an employment tribunal, the man cannot be identified and neither can his employer.
Despite this, a well-known British carrier said in a letter that the pilot was ‘in a position to cause considerable harm’ and added that it was in the ‘national interest’ to ensure he never flew commercial aircraft again.
Madagascar’s toppled president tried to end his exile in South Africa Saturday, but his commercial plane was forced to turn back mid-flight when his landing was blocked by the populist former disc jockey who toppled him.
Ex-President Marc Ravalomanana’s Indian Ocean island has a long history of volatile politics, and the air standoff shows how personal rivalry can stand in the way of stability.
IN THE WAKE of Internet “blackouts” protesting SOPA and PIPA (anti-piracy legislation currently before the U.S. Congress), a smaller, but no less passionate regulatory protest has been circulating among the world’s bartenders this weekend: Legislation sitting before the Mexican government. NOM-186 as it is called, is designed to tighten naming and production of regionally delineated agave-based spirits like tequila, mezcal and bacanora. But opponents feel the regulations benefit large, established producers at the expense of niche and family producers, and were surreptitiously introduced.
In Paris Turkish people from across Europe protested against the French Senate’s plans to vote on Monday on a bill making it illegal to deny the 1915 mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks.
Video at the link.
... it’s interesting.
Researchers from the Children’s Environmental Health Center at The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York have found an association between exposure to the chemical group known as phthalates and obesity in young children—including increased body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference.
Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s security services have locked up more than 1,000 members of other political parties over the past several months, detaining many of them in secret locations with no access to legal counsel and using “brutal torture” to extract confessions, his chief political rival has charged.
An Indian was among 162 people killed as heavily armed Islamists carried out a deadly Mumbai-style terror attack in Nigeria’s second largest city Kano, media reports and Indian officials said Sunday.
Boulder Time
