UK-Based Banksters Accused Of Massive Mis-Selling In Italy

By Joe Lynam: Several UK-based investment banks have been accused of mis-selling financial products to Italian cities and regions.

Nomura, UBS and Deutsche Bank are among those accused by Italian prosecutors of mis-selling derivatives in deals worth 35bn euros (£28bn).
The banks deny wrongdoing, but refused to comment further because the matter is now before the Italian courts.
BBC Newsnight discovered that London's financial watchdog was made aware of the mis-selling, but failed to act.
Now those Swap derivatives look as if they could further damage the entire Italian economy - the third largest in the eurozone.
Sicily has already needed a 400m-euro bailout from the federal government in Rome, which itself may soon need aid from its eurozone partners to stay financially afloat.
On Monday, official figures revealed that the Italian economy, which has contracted for the past four quarters, shrank by 0.8% between April and June, slightly more than previously estimated.
Between 1997 and 2007, dozens of Italian cities and regions borrowed 111bn euros from London-based investment banks - the repayments of which were funded by a type of derivative called a Swap

Mothers Rights Versus Fathers - Boycott Divorce Corp Movie?

By Susan Terrell Tompkins: Divorce Corp, a documentary due to be released in January 2014 is causing quite a stir between mother’s rights / “women’s rights” and father’s rights groups who support equally-shared parenting. In calling for a boycott of the movie, mother’s rights groups are quite upset that Divorce Corp advocates for more fair and balanced divorce and family court process, something that apparently irks the mother’s rights crowd which for years has enjoyed courts centered around them. As shared-parenting is being advanced across the world, it appears that many in the mother’s rights arena are calling for a boycott of Divorce Corp in an effort to maintain their position of total control.

Indian Communist Feminist Commits Suicide After Rival Feminists Public Shaming Rape Allegations

By Anil Kumar: In New Delhi, the Jawahar Lal Nehru University, which is popularly known as JNU, is a strong bastion of communists. Many of its professors have strong left-wing orientation. This place is also a hotbed of radical feminism. Khurshid Anwar, aged 55, is a former student of JNU and he a communist, who used to run a Non-Government Organization (NGO) known as the Institute for Social Democracy. He was a male feminist and just like other male feminists, all through his life he never bothered about false allegations of rape and their possible impact on the innocent men, who are accused. In fact, he may have even believed that the percentage of false allegations miniscule or less than 2% and hence not worth any attention, which is the standard Feminist line.
After an incident of rape of a young women one a bus in Delhi, violent protests broke out in Delhi, as many people read in the international news. Khurshid Anwar, his NGO, and his fellow comrades organised many of these protests. Pictures in his Facebook profile show him leading one such protest and he standing next to the police barricade.
On 18th December, less than 1 year of the protests that Kurshid Anwar organised, he committed suicide by jumping from his building, after media started flashing news that he allegedly raped a young feminist colleague, working in another NGO. The alleged incident happened in the month of September in his house, where some members of an NGO had organised a party.

Euro-Enthusiasts Can't Quite Hide Their Contempt For The Masses

Anti-slavery campaigners were also written off as cranks and gadflies
By Daniel Hannan: How do you get a poll to register a large majority in favour of EU membership? Easy. Confine your survey to quangocrats, charity heads, civil servants, CEOs of multi-national corporations and the like. The pro-EU lobby group, British Influence, has been trying to get people excited about its poll of “leading figures” – that is, 700 bien pensant metropolitans of whom, sure enough, 69 per cent want to stay in the EU. Indeed, the only surprise is that, of a demographic specifically selected for pro-Brussels bias, 31 per cent don't agree.
Not that I blame British Influence: when every poll of the general population shows an anti-EU majority, you have to clutch at whatever support you can find. Nor am I saying that all, or even most, of the people surveyed are beneficiaries of the Brussels racket. They don’t have to be. When enough NGOs get money from the Commission, even those that don’t tend to be inflected by the Euro-enthusiasm of their peers. When a large number multinationals and megabanks have invested in lobbying to get rules that suit them, other corporates get carried along by the groupthink.
Let’s run over some of the other things that all these “leading figures” have favoured over the years, shall we? State planning, prices and incomes policies, the SDP, the ERM. Almost without exception, the “leading figures” trotted out by British Influence to argue for the EU were, a decade ago, making precisely the same arguments about joining the euro: we’ll lose influence, overseas investment will dry up, blah blah fishcakes.

FUKUSHIMA: Desperate Tepco Hires Triads To Corral The Destitute For Work In Radioactive Areas.

Is this the bottom of the barrel at last?

Shizuya Nishiyama. 57, homeless man
By John Ward: I’m sure you will all be relieved to know that the situation at the Fukushima site is now so completely safe, nobody wants to work on cleaning it up, perhaps on the grounds that there’s no point in cleaning something up when it’s already clean.

Except that not even those on the dole will work there, because they’d rather take their chances – any chances – than work at Fukushima. Nobody believes the Tokyo government’s reassurances. And so Tepco is now hiring bounty hunters to search the streets and ditches for homeless people. Tepco is paying them $100 a mug – and the homeless victims themselves below the minimum wage – because only those on the verge of starvation will do it.

What Really Happens in the Drone Program from Someone On the Inside

By Michael Krieger: Over the weekend, Heather Linebaugh wrote a powerful Op-ed in The Guardian newspaper lamenting the lack of public understanding regarding the American drone program. Heather should know what she’s talking about, she served in the United Stated Air Force from 2009 until March 2012. She worked in intelligence as an imagery analyst and geo-spatial analyst for the drone program during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here are some key excerpts from her article:

Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them a few questions. I’d start with: “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?” And: “How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?” Or even more pointedly: “How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were unable to detect an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?”

Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.

The Radioactive Bomber (that irradiated girls)

Thunderf00t: I got a radiation meter to measure the radiation you get exposed to when flying. But how to test if its working or not?

LEAKED Confession: Cesspool Of Greek-German Corruption + Max Debt

By Wolf Richter: Apparently, it has been impossible to sell Greece any weapons at all, not even a water pistol, without bribing officials at the Defense Ministry. Corruption is so pandemic that Transparency International awarded Greece once again the dubious honor of being the most corrupt country in the EU. For 2013, Greece ended up in 80th place of the 177 countries in the survey, same as China. But it takes two to tango.
And in holier-than-thou Germany, where exporting at any price is a state religion (with chart) regardless of who runs the show, the defense industry was allegedly eager to dance with Greece – supplying tanks, submarines, and other equipment that broke Greece didn’t need and couldn’t afford.
Now there’s a confession. After four days of grilling, investigating magistrates in Athens extracted it from Antonios Kantas, General Secretary for Procurement at the Defense Ministry between 1996 and 2002. He’d been arrested in mid-December after authorities found nearly €14 million in various accounts. In his 30-page testimony, elements of which have been leaked, he admitted having pocketed €15 million in bribes since 1989 – just this one guy!
But it was a community effort that stretched across party lines. He named names, euros, and dollars, implicating 17 Greek politicians and businessmen.

Intersectionality is not just a word

By Diana Davison: On December 23rd, Eleanor Robertson made a passionate plea in The Guardian “In defence of intersectionality – one of feminism’s most important tools”. She laments that many feminists revile intersectionality as meaningless and appeals to us to recognize the internal importance of the issue.
I agree. There is much to be learned.
Intersectionality is not just a word, it is a word with many letters. Some of those letters are privileged. They are over-represented not only in this word but within language as a general body. While the letters C and Y are acknowledged as oppressed members of the alphabet, as evidenced by their enhanced point value in Scrabble, there are many letters with only a singular occurrence in this word which struggle to be seen as uniquely disadvantaged.
The letters A and I share the distinct privilege of being, in and of themselves, an entire word. Yet we can see with intersectionality that the letter I occurs a whopping three times whilst the letter A struggles to be seen only once and, even then, doesn’t appear until the the word is over half finished… almost as if an afterthought. Obviously the situation is more complex than we thought. Just as white feminists are deemed by some to be advantaged they, like the letter A in this word, have their own unique battles that they fight to expose.
We all know that the letter Y is marginalized. Quite often it only appears tacked on to the end of words and not only does Y suffer from being consistently last, it has the multiple oppression factor of being placed in a suffix.

Why Antifeminism is a Thing

Victor Zen

Re: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0jk1...
VarmitCoyote asks me a couple of questions. He is waiting to get his internet connection back in his home for a Skype conversation with me. I only answer one of his questions because I would prefer to address the other in the Skype vid.

Domestic Violence Revelations with Erin Pizzey (1-5)

Paul Elam

Chomsky Warns About Growing Threat Of Nuclear War In 2014

"It’s beyond irony that the richest most powerful countries in the world are racing towards disaster while the so-called primitive societies are the ones in the forefront of trying to avert it,” 

UK BANNED Press TV: Renowned American linguist, philosopher and political commentator Noam Chomsky warns that the world is racing towards “environmental catastrophe” and “nuclear war” in 2014.

Answering a question in an interview with Salon.com about the contemporary issues which particularly concerns him, the scholar answered that there are two major problems from among a long list that are worth mentioning.
“These are issues that seriously threaten the possibility of decent human survival. One of them is the growing threat of environmental catastrophe, which we are racing towards as if we were determined to fall off a precipice, and the other is the threat of nuclear war, which has not declined, in fact it’s very serious and in many respects is growing,” Chomsky said.