Dip in Dow

The Dow have a big sell-off in the last few days.

Dow Jones said its computer system couldn’t handle the vast volume of trades — about 4.5 billion, double the daily average — at the New York Stock Exchange.

Weather Report

Today there is an ice storm. While it is not as cold as it has been (it’s actually quite mild) everything is frozen. The weight of the ice on the trees is making them collapse and this is a danger to people walking underneath them.

I took these pics from my window. In few months everything will be green and beautiful.

Millionaire Clintons

Former president Bill Clinton, who came to the White House with modest means and left deeply in debt, has collected nearly $40 million in speaking fees over the past six years, according to interviews and financial disclosure statements filed by his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

Last year, one of his most lucrative since he left the presidency, Clinton earned $9 million to $10 million on the lecture circuit. He averaged almost a speech a day — 352 for the year — but only about 20 percent were for personal income. The others were given for no fee or for donations to the William J. Clinton Foundation, the nonprofit group he founded to pursue causes such as the fight against AIDS.

His paid speeches included $150,000 appearances before landlord groups, biotechnology firms and food distributors, as well as speeches in England, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia that together netted him more than $1.6 million. On one particularly good day in Canada, Clinton made $475,000 for two speeches, more than double his annual salary as president.

“I never had a nickel to my name until I got out of the White House, and now I’m a millionaire, the most favored person for the Washington Republicans,” Clinton told a friendly audience in Kentucky last fall. “I get a tax cut every year, no matter what our needs are.”

Indeed, the Clintons — who left the White House with an estimated $12 million in legal debts rung up during the Whitewater, campaign fundraising and Monica S. Lewinsky investigations — are worth an estimated $10 million to $50 million, according to Hillary Clinton’s most recent disclosure form. That is attributable primarily to the speaking fees and to the seven-figure book deals that both Clintons signed shortly after leaving the White House.

Believe it or not…

A radical proposal to reunite Anglicans with the Catholic Church under the leadership of the Pope has been delivered by bishops from both churches.

Their 42-page statement suggests the churches could turn back the ecclesiastical clock, 450 years after Henry VIII separated from Rome in the Reformation.

Australian leaders from both churches dismissed the move as highly improbable last night, although the Australian who heads the Catholic side of the project, Brisbane’s Archbishop John Bathersby, said it was a significant step forward in an attempt at unity that began 35 years ago.

Archbishop Bathersby, the co-chairman of the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission, said the relationship between the churches was closer than ever.

The statement was leaked to The Times in London, but Archbishop Bathersby said a suggestion that an agreement was close was too strong.

Neither church had yet officially launched the report. It is being considered by the Vatican, where Catholic bishops are preparing a formal response.

Worldwide, there are about 78 million Anglicans compared with a billion Catholics. The commission was established in 2000 by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton, and Australia’s Cardinal Edward Cassidy, then head of the Vatican’s Council for Christian Unity. Its aim was to find a way of moving towards unity through “common life and mission”. Problem areas on the Anglican side include the Pope and on the Catholic side women bishops and the ordination of a practising gay as bishop in America. The world’s Anglican leaders are meeting in Tanzania to discuss the crisis over sexuality that may lead to schism and Archbishop Bathersby says they will also consider the 42-page report.

Continued at:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/pope-an-anglican-church-unity-plan/2007/02/19/1171733685067.html

Also at Time.com today:

“When Priests Pilfer” is about two priests in Florida who misappropriated $8.6 million over 42 years.

Here are some excerpts:

They allegedly diverted St. Vincent collection money to secret slush-fund accounts while living as hedonistically as Renaissance Popes. The police report says Skehan, 79, gave a “girlfriend” $134,000, made a rare-coins purchase for $275,000 and owned an oceanfront condominium worth $455,000. It says Guinan, 63, whom Barbarito removed as St. Vincent’s pastor in 2005, spent his take on expensive vacations to Las Vegas and the Bahamas; a $220,000 renovation of his parish residence; and payments to his own “paramour,” the bookkeeper of his former parish, whom he gave $47,000 for credit-card bills and her child’s tuition. Both priests were arrested by Delray Beach police last September–after Guinan returned from a South Pacific cruise–and were charged with grand theft. (They pleaded not guilty.)

St. Vincent’s may be the worst known case of embezzlement to hit U.S. Catholicism, but Skehan and Guinan are joined by a gallery of other recent alleged klepto-clerics. Last month a Virginia priest was indicted for allegedly embezzling $600,000 from two Catholic churches–in part to help support the woman and three children he had been secretly living with. Last year a Connecticut priest was accused of pilfering up to $1.4 million to pay for his Audi cars, luxury-hotel stays, jewelry for his boyfriend and a Fort Lauderdale condo. And last June another priest was sentenced to five years in prison after the misappropriation of $2 million from the Church of the Holy Cross in Rumson, N.J.

Not that clerical enrichment is by any means an exclusively Catholic scourge: it’s hard to forget that Protestant TV evangelist Jim Bakker once defrauded his followers of $158 million.

Marie Antoinette – the movie

Marie Antoinette is an Academy Award-nominated 2006 film written and directed by Sofia Coppola (her father did The Godfather) about the life of Marie Antoinette. It was Coppola’s first film since winning an Academy Award for the screenplay of 2003’s Lost In Translation. The film is loosely based on the historical biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Lady Antonia Fraser, and ends with the fall of Versailles.

This movie is nothing like what you’d expect. The music is modern. It’s all in English and nobody speaks with an accent. It is very entertaining and will change your perception about Marie Antoinette and that whole bit of history.

Even though it looks like a chick flic, it doesn’t really fit into that category, nor drama, nor comedy. It is interesting and entertaining and very well made.

If you liked Lost in Translation, or if you like Kirsten Dunst, then see this movie. Highly recommended.

Storm rider’s miracle survival

A German paraglider survived lightning, pounding hail, minus 40-degree Celsius temperatures and oxygen deprivation after a storm system sucked her to an altitude higher than Mount Everest.

Ewa Wisnierska, 35, passed out due to a lack of oxygen and flew unconscious for up to an hour covered in ice after reaching an altitude of 9947 metres – near the cruising height of a jumbo jet.

The champion sportswoman’s survival was like “winning Lotto 10 times in a row”, Australia’s most experienced paraglider says.

Continued at:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/02/16/1171405415598.html?from=top5

Wake up: ANZUS no security blanket

SMH.com.au

THE American ambassador’s assessment of the ANZUS treaty yesterday should be a wake-up call for comfortable Australian assumptions that it is any sort of security guarantee.

Since the inception of the treaty in 1951, Australian politicians have given the public the clear impression that the treaty is a national 000 line which will unfailingly bring an emergency deployment of US forces to our defence.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, has perpetuated this idea by describing ANZUS as our “security guarantee”. Yet the treaty has never been any such thing, and was deliberately constructed so that Washington was under no binding or automatic obligation to use force for Australia’s security.

The US ambassador, Robert McCallum, reminded us yesterday of how lightly the treaty rests in the consciousness of the superpower when he cheerfully volunteered at the National Press Club that he has never read it.

It is not a long or difficult document to read. At only 840 words, and written in reasonably straightforward English, it would not tax the mind of a Rhodes scholar and super-smart lawyer like Mr McCallum.

The Menzies government, which negotiated the treaty, wanted Washington to give Australia a document with the sort of automaticity that the US provided to its allies in NATO – that an attack on any party would automatically be regarded an attack on all.

Instead, the ANZUS treaty says only that an attack on any of the signatories would oblige the others to “act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes”.

There is no mention of the use of armed force. And the phrase “in accordance with its constitutional processes” was included by the US to give it wriggle room, says a former head of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, Alan Renouf.

And when Mr McCallum was asked yesterday exactly what those constitutional processes might be in the US, especially in the event that the White House and Congress disagreed over the course of action, he answered:

“I’ve not done the constitutional analysis and I would imagine that there would be a vast difference of opinions among academics and practising lawyers and politicians as to what might be required.” In other words, the response would be confusion.

Yet, on the one occasion where Australia sought to invoke the treaty, there was no confusion whatsoever. As another former head of Foreign Affairs, Dick Woolcott, recalled yesterday: “The last time we sought US assistance under ANZUS, when our troops were in potential conflict with Indonesia during the Confrontation crisis in 1964, it was denied to us.

“The message came back very promptly from the White House: ‘You got yourselves into this, you get yourselves out.’ A lot of Australians have been anaesthetised into thinking ANZUS is some kind of cast-iron guarantee. It is not.”

One of the linchpins of the unofficial relationship between Australia and the US, the founder of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, the Melbourne businessman Phil Scanlan, summed up the lesson: “We need to make sure our rhetoric about the relationship does not get ahead of the reality.” Mr McCallum has done Australians a favour in reminding us that this is exactly what our political leaders have done.

I searched the web for a picture and found this one – it’s on Puntiki’s blog!

Inclement Weather

I rang a company and got an answering machine (Yanks don’t say answerphone) with the message, “We are closed today due to the inclement weather.”

Dictionary.com defines inclement as:
1. (of the weather, the elements, etc.) severe, rough, or harsh; stormy.
2. not kind or merciful.

This is indeed an accurate word for today. This morning I looked out the window and saw that it was snowing – horizontally. So I put on my cold-weather gear and walked to work. It turned out not to be that cold, just snowing and windy. But it’s a pain in the ass having to walk through knee deep snow if I’m going any distance – like to town, which I also did today. Now I’m home, I’m going to turn off the phone, lock my door, have a hot shower and veg out until tomorrow when I’ll do it all again. (The pics above were taken from my dorm at dusk.)

I keep thinking that the smartest man in the presidential race is Al Gore. This is because he hasn’t said that he’s running yet. I think he’s waiting for the other candidates to exhaust themselves and their sponsors’ funds and over-expose themselves to the public in the near two-year run up to the election (election day is 4 Nov 08). He’ll show up one day as a fresh face, having stood back and taken in the ever-shifting political landscape and solve the voters’ dilemma: Do I vote for a black man or a white woman? Al Gore has rebranded himself as far more charismatic than the boring fuddy-duddy that we used to think he was. I’ll vote for him by persuading a Yank to vote my way.

Funny Video

This is quite good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K66dXOmfIyU

How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish.

The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent. The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.

In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover.

Details of the shipments have emerged in a memorandum prepared for the meeting of the House committee on oversight and government reform which is examining Iraqi reconstruction. Its chairman, Henry Waxman, a fierce critic of the war, said the way the cash had been handled was mind-boggling. “The numbers are so large that it doesn’t seem possible that they’re true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?”

The memorandum details the casual manner in which the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority disbursed the money, which came from Iraqi oil sales, surplus funds from the UN oil-for-food programme and seized Iraqi assets.

“One CPA official described an environment awash in $100 bills,” the memorandum says. “One contractor received a $2m payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack.

“They also found that $774,300 in cash had been stolen from one division’s vault. Cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices. One official was given $6.75m in cash, and was ordered to spend it in one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds.”

The minutes from a May 2004 CPA meeting reveal “a single disbursement of $500m in security funding labelled merely ‘TBD’, meaning ‘to be determined’.”

The memorandum concludes: “Many of the funds appear to have been lost to corruption and waste … thousands of ‘ghost employees’ were receiving pay cheques from Iraqi ministries under the CPA’s control. Some of the funds could have enriched both criminals and insurgents fighting the United States.”

According to Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, the $8.8bn funds to Iraqi ministries were disbursed “without assurance the monies were properly used or accounted for”. But, according to the memorandum, “he now believes that the lack of accountability and transparency extended to the entire $20bn expended by the CPA”.

To oversee the expenditure the CPA was supposed to appoint an independent certified public accounting firm. “Instead the CPA hired an obscure consulting firm called North Star Consultants Inc. The firm was so small that it reportedly operates out of a private home in San Diego.” Mr Bowen found that the company “did not perform a review of internal controls as required by the contract”.

However, evidence before the committee suggests that senior American officials were unconcerned about the situation because the billions were not US taxpayers’ money. Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, reminded the committee that “the subject of today’s hearing is the CPA’s use and accounting for funds belonging to the Iraqi people held in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq. These are not appropriated American funds. They are Iraqi funds. I believe the CPA discharged its responsibilities to manage these Iraqi funds on behalf of the Iraqi people.”

Bremer’s financial adviser, retired Admiral David Oliver, is even more direct. The memorandum quotes an interview with the BBC World Service. Asked what had happened to the $8.8bn he replied: “I have no idea. I can’t tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn’t – nor do I actually think it’s important.”

Q: “But the fact is billions of dollars have disappeared without trace.”

Oliver: “Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah I understand. I’m saying what difference does it make?”

Mr Bremer, whose disbanding of the Iraqi armed forces and de-Ba’athification programme have been blamed as contributing to the present chaos, told the committee: “I acknowledge that I made mistakes and that with the benefit of hindsight, I would have made some decisions differently. Our top priority was to get the economy moving again. The first step was to get money into the hands of the Iraqi people as quickly as possible.”

Millions of civil service families had not received salaries or pensions for months and there was no effective banking system. “It was not a perfect solution,” he said. “Delay might well have exacerbated the nascent insurgency and thereby increased the danger to Americans.”