bits of news

In the news ...

-- Any collusive role Standard & Poors may have played in the economic implosion of 2008 is likely to sink beneath the waves of collective forgetfulness. The government's legal attempt to hold S&P's feet to the fire of responsibility is rated as weak at best.

"It is a crappy case. It's a hammer to get a settlement and all of the settlements we have seen so far have been a mere slap on the wrist," said Janet Tavakoli, a derivatives and structured finance consultant....

--  The trial of dead lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky has been delayed until March 22.

He was arrested after testifying that interior ministry officials had used the UK-based firm to embezzle $230m by filing false corporate tax returns.
It is said to be the first posthumous prosecution in Russian legal history.

 --  The battle may be far from home, but CIA analysts studying real-time combat tapes are feeling stresses of their own ... helplessness, regret, remorse. A chaplain and a psychologist have been added to the goings-on behind closed doors.

-- At the same time that the U.S. government has honored an increased number of Freedom of Information Act requests ... it has likewise rejected an increased number of those requests. Given the human tendency to try to avoid responsibility and to cloak that evasion with something as grand as "national security," I for one am glad if men like Julian Assange (Wikileaks) and Bradley Manning are still in the mix. I have yet to read any demonstrable evidence showing that what Assange or Manning did caused significant harm... whereas secrecy (think "Weapons of Mass Destruction," for example) seems to depict an often-dismal track record.