This Stargate-Portal is named such as it connects Galactic Center to Sol center to Gaia center. Direct connection of these energy centers enables direct communication of each, for each, as well as direction communication of Galactic Sol with Hue-man Soul. For those that receive this direct communication, those shall be beams of Light for all within their locales. No effort is needed and none is requested. Only receptivity at Higher Levels.
The close-minded of all types are being removed to their next house of containment. The close minded are no longer permitted to distribute lower energies to Hue-manity. The Central Stargate Portal has sealed the fate of those limited ones, and they shall be repaired elsewhere.
The Central Stargate Portal may be called on by all those with open minds and hearts and desire to attune with, assist, and ascend with Gaia. All requests with such alignment are honored, and manifest as needed for each individual, group, and planetary body.
We thank those who have continued on in the face of what has been termed “delays”. None of those exist in truth. Timing is in perfection, and Central Stargate Portal assures all Light from Cosmic Central supports ascension.
7/07/2012
Central Stargate-Portal of Light Has Formed and Stabilized | The Galactic Free Press http://bit.ly/NfCaKk
PAO - Sheldan Nidle! Great info about the arrests Update for July 3, 2012
Greg Giles – Message From The Galactic Federation Of Light – 7 July 2012 | Lucas 2012 Infos
Justice is being served throughout your world as you read these words today. Arrests are taking place and beings who have committed crimes against the people of Earth are being taken into custody one by one throughout corners of your entire globe. We, the Galactic Federation of Light, are monitoring these situations and we are noting the progress that the men and women who are on the front lines are making, and we are very happy to report that they are making good progress, steady progress, and that we see this momentum not fading away but growing in intensity as more of those who have conspired against humanity are brought to the justice that has always been for them inevitable.
We would like to see this momentum fortified by the sharing of this and all relevant information pertaining to these arrests, what they are all about, and the enormous benefits that await humanity as soon as a sufficient number of these arrests are put ‘on the books’, as you say. We would like to see more of you, our Lightworkers, sharing and discussing this information and informing your brothers and sisters who do not yet know of these proceedings as well as everyone who has been anticipating these arrests but who does not yet know that they have indeed commenced. We wish to make it clear that these arrests are in fact taking place and we cannot be any clearer on this matter, no matter if there are reports to the contrary, as we have a greatly expanded field of vision and we clearly see what is transpiring on your front lines, and what is taking place are arrest after
arrest of the members and associates of the faction known loosely as your criminal cabal.We would like to see momentum pick up, and we feel this momentum will pick up when the news of this event begins to build like a wave driving all throughout your Internet communities. This is your job at this time. We wish to see you help build this wave of information, and we wish again to say you will not be left ‘holding the bag’, as it were, as we are not in the business of supplying you with false, misleading or inaccurate information. We, it could be said, are in the information business. We are here in your world to help shine light, and light is information. You are Lightworkers, so you may say you are information workers. This is what you are and this is what you do, and all of you do it very well. If you did not, you would not have been chosen to be here, and this goes for each and every one of you that read and resonate with these and other like messages.
You are Lightworkers. You may not realize this or have found a way to believe this, but if you are following these words and you are resonating with them, then you are a Lightworker and are here in service to your Creator and to our mission to help shine the light of information through the darkened corridors of this world. There will come a day, and it now is very evident it will come sooner than later, that all of you will once again understand fully who it is you truly are. We will not spoil your surprise party as we see this as a very exciting climax to your journey here, a journey that has taken you through an amnestic state where you have locked away safely all the memories of who you are, who all your friends and family are, and all your past experiences. This has been a remarkable endeavor and one that is not very commonly experienced here in this universe, and we wish for you, our loved ones, to enjoy every moment of this experience to its fullest and we will do everything that we can, just as we promised you before you departed many years ago, to allow you to enjoy to its fullest everything you possibly can from this rare treat.One of the enjoyments that are in store for you are the moments when bits and pieces of your true identity and of your past are being shared with you and you indeed receive them, recognizing them and fitting the beautiful puzzle pieces together. We are helping you with this part of our project by telepathically, and in some cases non-telepathically, sharing hints and clues with you. We enjoy this part of our mission possibly as much as any other portion of our mission, simply because it is so fun to choose a clue to send our loved ones and to see that you not only received it, but have recognized it and in many cases have experienced great joy in the receiving of this gift. We are also so happy to have received many ‘thank yous’ from you in return for these presents and we appreciate that greatly, and it makes us feel wonderful and reminds us why we love you so much and how much we miss you.
We will all be together again soon; there can be no denying this now. Our mission together with you is now gathering momentum and will reach full speed; there is no stopping this now. The arrests of the members of your criminal cabal and their underlings is just a small piece of this enormous operation, but it is the central piece. It is the triggering domino which will allow a series of hundreds and even thousands of dominoes to fall neatly in place and in its proper and perfect timing. We will keep you fully abreast and updated as to these proceedings, as we feel this is perhaps at this time the most important information to share with you and we do not wish to deny this matter justice by speaking with you on a daily basis about so many other matters. We do wish for you at this time to focus on these arrests and just for now forsake some of your other duties as Lightworkers such as sharing the video evidence of our presence, as we do not wish for one moment to allow this incredible event to go unnoticed by so many of your people.At this time, we have not received confirmation that your major and even minor media outlets are willing to participate and cover these events that are taking place throughout media jurisdictions all over your world. This will change; you can be assured of this. One of the greatest obstacles to the media coverage of these events is fear, as threats have been levied against heads of departments and many men and women of rank-and-file throughout some of your media outlets. We wish at this time to say that we are also offering protection to those men and women who choose to stand firm and tall in the face of fear and do what it is that they fully understand is right, is just, and is so very much needed here in this world to help free your people and your planet once and for all from the grip of these tyrannical rulers who have oppressed the defenseless for far too long now.We are monitoring these situations and we tell you we will do all that we can to protect you and not let any harm come to you. We have very proven and advanced methods of security and protection, and we have rolled out entire infantries to watch over you, the men and women of your worldwide media, and protect you from any harm that anyone may wish to cause you. We will do all that we can in the offering of this safety and protection and tell you that we have in the past offered just this kind of protection for members of other worlds in similar situations and we have fully succeeded in safeguarding each and every being involved in many different operations. We will leave no stone left unturned to assist you in this way if you choose to do what it is you know has to be done to allow freedom to once again reign in this world.
We are your protectors, we are your friends and we are your higher dimensional family, and we will do all that we can to protect and safeguard our beloved family. We are the Galactic Federation of Light.As channeled through Greg Giles
Cobra – Portal 2012 – New Interview – 7 July 2012
New Interview
You might want to listen to Cobra interview with Alexandra Meadors:
Or read the transcript directly:
Enjoy!
Bailed-Out AIG Wants More Than $30 Million In Taxes Back
American International Group, the insurance giant saved by a massive federal bailout, wants some tax money back – from 1991.
AIG is suing in Federal Claims Court in Washington for $30.2 million. It says that's how much interest is owed from an overpayment 21 years ago.
AIG said it underpaid taxes for 1997, 1998, and 1999. But it said the government owes it interest for an overpayment in 1991. It said the two claims work out to $30.2 million in the company's favor.
New York-based AIG said it filed the lawsuit on Thursday because the statute of limitations on its claims was about to run out. The statute of limitations runs for six years on the amounts, which AIG said were determined in July and August 2006.
The Internal Revenue Service is run by the Treasury Department, which also owns about 60 percent of AIG common stock, which it has been selling in pieces.
AIG's $182.5 billion bailout was the largest of the financial crisis.
Last month, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said the insurer had completed repaying loans it made as part of the bailout.
AIG shares fell 40 cents, or 1.3 percent, to close at $31.57. The stock, which dropped to single digits during the financial crisis, has traded between $19.18 and $35.05 in the past 52 weeks.
From Ireland to Greece: Tragedy and Renewal in the Eurozone Crisis
The past several years, I have engaged intensively in research and writing on post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. One thing I frequently hear in Dublin is -- "well, at least we're not Greece." So, after three trips to Ireland in the last half year, I jumped at a chance to visit Greece after the recent elections. What I found is that the two nations have more in common than either would like to admit.
In terms of data (via Eurostat), Ireland is marginally better off -- illustrated by some minor but important recent steps towards market financing of its debt and an increase in American investment over the last year. Yet both are not near the bottoming out of their crisis. Greece, for example, owed at the end of 2011 approximately 165 percent debt relative to its gross domestic product -- Ireland was at about 108 percent. This is better for Ireland, but if Greece were not in the Eurozone, Ireland would only be surpassed by Italy as Europe's worst. In terms of annual deficit, Ireland entered 2012 worse than Greece - with about an annual deficit of about 13 percent of gross domestic product and Greece at about 9 percent. Greece, on the other hand is deeply mired in depression -- with gross domestic projected to decline by at least 5 percent and projected Irish growth just under 1 percent positive for 2012. In Ireland, however, one has to discount for multinational corporations which pay insufficient tax into the economy and produce few new jobs to sufficiently affect indigenous economic growth. Greece's unemployment is over 20 percent -- while Ireland's has now hit 15 percent. Ireland's would be higher were it not bleeding its talent via emigration. This is particularly evident in youth unemployment (under age 25) which in Greece is over 50 percent, but in Ireland around 30 percent.
Ireland and Greece are mired in the midst of major international bailouts of their economies which are based on unsustainable economic and political assumptions. In both countries, if you are a public sector employee you are being paid with money borrowed from other countries -- mainly Germany. Both countries are caught in enforced austerity via these bailouts. On the other hand, both would have to make massive public sector cuts anyway as their finances had run far behind their social ambitions. Neither have realistic alternatives.
Ireland and Greece have gone through recent national votes and reaffirmed their commitment to the Eurozone - while revealing significant political shifts. Ireland voted to approve its ability to draw on future European stability mechanism capital -- a clear reflection that the people there understand that a second bailout is likely after 2013. The Greek vote also was an investment in stability and achieved a new centrist coalition government. But neither could be read as an affirmation of support for the status quo. In Ireland, the second most popular party in the country is nationalist Sinn Féin and in Greece a new grouping of leftist parties -- called Syriza -- nearly won. Both parties are drawing support in a growing anti-European Union and anti-austerity mood -- though few people in either country want to bolt the Eurozone. Neither party has a realistic plan for governance, but in opposition, they need only to play off people's emotions and fears for political advantage.
Had Ireland and Greece voted differently, both countries would have confronted likely bank runs, capital flight, foreign direct investment concerns, and even shortages of basic supplies -- likely leading to a deep decline far beyond that experienced to date. Ireland might have fared better given their capacity to export and their proximity to the British Pound, but it would have been a catastrophic outcome regardless. Tragically, the main purpose of the bailouts has not been to save these economies, but rather contain them from spreading further economic chaos. Once the Eurozone crisis hit Italy in fall 2011, both Ireland and Greece lost their remaining leverage to drive a hard bargain on better bailout terms -- now both must wait to see if comprehensive European solutions will work.
What struck me most in talking to people in Athens and other parts of Greece was how common the refrains were from my visits to Ireland. People in both countries want the world to know the pain they are feeling. They want the world to know that they understand that they have to pay for years of excess -- but they desperately need relief and a sense of a future. Neither country, in particular, has a sustained sense of advocacy for the youth among the political class - which risks the good faith of generations with nothing to do with the crisis but who are suffering the most from it. Sitting at café's in the Plaka in Athens it was hard not to notice the lack of tourists and the steady flow of local Greeks, out for a stroll, but not spending money. This I frequently see in Ireland as well -- though tourism has rebounded there while it is down by about 15 percent in Greece. In either case, tourism will not offset the fact that consumer spending in both countries has fallen dramatically. Only indigenous growth will solve the economic crises.
Both Ireland and Greece offer the world extraordinary human capital, which is being wasted via austerity without simultaneous targeted investments for the future. No doubt, too, both countries face even harder choices in the coming months. In Ireland, another round of deep budget cuts will force a reexamination of a compact on public sector employment and benefits and put major strains on the governing coalition with a large junior partner Labour Party. In Greece, the government must make massive cuts in the public sector to qualify for further bailout payments - including shedding an additional 150,000 people from the public sector workforce by 2015. Without those bailouts, the government will run out of money and the threat of chaos would return.
The people of Ireland and Greece, who did not cause these situations, need relief. Germany and other lender states will only get paid back if these economies have room for growth. This means they need to be able to use the bailout funds flexibly and they need major infrastructure projects that put people to work and stimulate future business investment. Most importantly, they need more time -- a lot more time -- to meet the terms of the bailouts regarding both cuts and interest rates. While I cannot say what that would mean for Greece, in the case of Ireland it means they need their bailout terms to extend over 30 years and likely at a 2 percent interest rate.
At the end of the day, what the people of Ireland and Greece deserve is a sense of dignity and respect for each nation's contribution to the world -- history, culture, tradition, innovation, and a deep commitment to democracy. The people in both countries understand they will not see prosperity for generations. Instead they are relearning that pure materialism does not necessarily bring real wealth and that growth is vital, but sustained growth is more important than the quick win or fudged balance sheets. Hopefully, Germany will realize that it cannot, having achieved positive vote outcomes in Ireland and Greece, now put these countries to the back burner.
Finally, now is the time to visit Ireland and Greece! The deals are great, the people extremely welcoming. I had multiple hotel managers say to me in Greece that people had cancelled reservations in advance of their vote last month for fear of riots. This is absurd. Go to Ireland and see the origins of the great literature and music of the world -- and the most beautiful scenery you will ever see. Go to Greece and see the Acropolis, Delphi, or take in an island and swim the Mediterranean Sea. You will be greeted with open arms and you will experience real riches offered by two of the great civilizations the world has known. Hopefully, as more people do that, the world will also realize that it is time to rethink the balance of austerity to include investment in the rich tapestry of people that Ireland and Greece have to offer.
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Joseph Stiglitz: For-Profit Colleges 'Exploit Those At The Bottom'
Joseph Stiglitz is not a fan of for-profit colleges.
Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and chief economist of the World Bank, recently took to the pages of USA Today to denounce America's widening wealth gulf, and probably to get a little bit of exposure for his new book.
In the midst of a broader indictment of the U.S. education system, Stiglitz wrote that for-profit colleges "exploit those at the bottom" of society, and that they're "better at exploitation than at delivering a valuable education."
For-profit colleges, as the name suggests, are making money at a rate that public and private universities for the most part can't match. And at many such schools, there's no indication that they do an especially good job of equipping students to succeed.
Students at for-profit colleges have a tendency to wind up in debt and with no degree, and even those who graduate and enter the workforce often earn less than their peers who went to traditional universities.
Many for-profit schools seem to do a poor job of preparing their students -- who are often highly leveraged with educational loans -- to compete in the working world. The industry also has a troubling history of financially exploiting military veterans.
Maybe Nobel Prize winner is onto something.
Related on HuffPost:
Mitch Feierstein: U.S. Congress: You're Fired! 68% of the Country Is Right!
How low can a political system sink? Pretty low it would seem. A recent Rasmussen poll suggests that around two-thirds of us would happily fire every single member of Congress, a spectacular lack of confidence in our lawmakers. These are unprecedented levels of disdain and the sad thing is that they're largely justified.
The conventional analysis of this malaise has to do with partisanship in Washington. Too much money, too many special interests, too many lobbyists, too many non-competitive electoral districts leading to a new breed of politicians who pander only to the increasingly extreme demands of their base. The Constitution was never intended to foster such gridlock. Remember that the authors of that Constitution lived in a nation without political parties -- in a world where parties of the modern sort were unknown. It was 1796 before the party system had really taken hold and even then, that politics was more fissile, more fluid, than anything we have now. Indeed, you could argue with conviction that the country has never had a more gridlocked, mutually hostile and partisan Congress. At a time of great economic peril, that's a terrible position to be in.
There are wider consequences too, best expressed in the Russian proverb that the fish rots from the head. If our national leadership is incapable of showing transparent, accountable leadership, what hope is there for the other institutions and organizations that together create the nation?
One recent example would be shocking if repeated injury hadn't more or less robbed us of the ability to be shocked. The Fast and Furious scandal matters. For a number of years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms allowed guns to 'walk.' The idea was to allow suspect purchasers to acquire guns in the belief that these weapons could be tracked back to high-level figures in the Mexican drug cartels.
I don't know if that was a completely dumb idea or not. I'm not qualified to comment. What I do know is that many dozens of Mexican citizens are alleged to have been killed by these weapons and at least one U.S. Federal agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, was shot dead. One ATF official told a congressional oversight committee, "The ATF armed the [Sinaloa] cartel. It's disgusting."
But these things happen. In a big country, with a complex government, sometimes people do stupid things. That's not, in itself, the issue.
The issue is what happens next. Is there a transparent investigative process, whereby the facts are investigated and the appropriate people dismissed or (if found to be in breach of the law) punished? Of course not. The House voted to cite Eric Holder for contempt of Congress in a battle over which documents should be released to the inquiry. Holder claims he's just a proxy for Obama and the entire attack is partisan. Nancy Pelosi argues that it's all part of a giant conspiracy to undermine democracy. Just in case things hadn't sunk low enough, Rep. Trey Gowdy tells Pelosi that she's "mind-numbingly stupid" and suggests she "schedule an appointment with a doctor."
And an American officer has been shot dead by guns that walked out of the country under the direction of our ATF officials. And Mexican drug cartels have bolstered their armories. And our southern neighbor has descended that little bit further into violence and anarchy. Yet all our politicians can do is call each other names and bicker at each other.
So much for the head of the fish. The rest of that fishy body isn't smelling too good either. Barclays, a British bank that scooped up Lehman's U.S. operations and has a huge presence on these shores, has admitted manipulating the LIBOR "Fixings." Those markets are multi-multi-trillion dollar markets and if the banks are rigging them for their benefit, you can bet your house that you're one of those to have lost money as a consequence.
So what happens? Answer: not much. It's been fined a little fraction over 1% of its market cap. The Chief Executive -- who's already pocketed over £100 million in pay over the past few years -- resigns (but will probably get a huge payoff). No one goes to jail. No one ever does, more deflection and more diversion.
Or ING, a foreign bank trading out of New York, is fined for fraud, breaking sanctions aimed at Cuba and Iran. The fine was big, but who goes to jail? Nobody. Instead the bank says in a statement that it, "it took a provision of €370 million ($462 million) in the first quarter of the year to cover the penalties, set up a team to prevent and detect money laundering, closed its representative office in Cuba in 2007, and ended relationships with sanctioned entities." Gee, shucks.
Or MF Global, run by Jon Corzine, formerly of Goldman Sachs and close to the Obama White House. The firm went bust and around $1.6 billion in client money has gone walkabout. If someone takes money that isn't theirs, that is theft. I'm not talking about the law, necessarily, I'm not a lawyer -- but I am talking about ethics. If someone or some group of people conspires to deprive clients of $1.6 billion, that person or group of people should be wearing orange and looking out of windows with bars on them. But what actually happens? Nothing.
The solutions are so simple. We need transparency and accountability at the top. We need accountability and transparency all the way down. Forget about creating new laws when we never enforce existing ones. If you mess up, you bear the consequences of your actions. If a federal operation goes wrong, it is investigated swiftly and rigorously, with appropriate outcomes for those involved. If your firm goes bust, nobody bails it out. If you breach the law, you go to jail. If you steal a thousand bucks, you receive a light sentence. If you steal a thousand million bucks, you should get the cell next to Bernie Madoff and the same release date: 14 November 2139.
Is that going to happen any time soon?
Nope. It won't. But meantime, two-thirds of us are right. We need to fire this Congress and start again. The pledge of allegiance talks about justice for all. We need to honor that pledge at the moment we are doing the opposite.
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JPMorgan Chase Must Explain Why It's Not Turning Over Emails In FERC Probe, Judge Says
By Erin Geiger Smith
July 5 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge has ordered JPMorgan Chase & Co to explain why the court should not force the bank to turn over 25 internal emails demanded as part of an investigation into whether it manipulated electricity markets in California and the Midwest.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) filed a petition in federal court in Washington on Monday asking the court to order the bank to show cause as to why it would not comply with a subpoena issued by the commission as part of its investigation into the bank's power trading.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly gave the bank until July 13 to submit an explanation as to why the court should not enforce FERC's subpoenas. JPMorgan has asserted the emails are protected by the attorney-client privilege.
JPMorgan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The FERC tangle threatens to become another dent in JPMorgan Chairman Jamie Dimon's once sterling reputation, although the real cost is almost certain to be negligible compared to the bank's disastrous "London Whale" derivative trades that may cost it $4 billion to $6 billion. However, if the agency presses ahead with a formal enforcement effort it may deepen the damage by evoking memories of the California power trading scandals a decade ago.
FERC has recently stepped up its efforts to end manipulation of U.S. power markets, and news of the subpoena followed a series of more advanced probes of other big Wall Street banks and a record $245 million penalty against Constellation Energy.
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Richard C. Leone: The Unfinished War
Nearly 50 years ago President Lyndon Johnson rallied the nation in support of a "War on Poverty." It was a goal widely accepted as necessary and realistic. While total "victory" might not have been unachievable, the effort was embraced and pursued by many leaders of both parties. The Nixon administration, for example, played a key role in advancement of the earned income tax credit and Ronald Reagan reached an agreement with the then Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, to strengthen Social Security's finances for another generation (today, about half of the nation's elderly would fall below the poverty line without Social Security).
While Johnson's initiatives and subsequent policies didn't end poverty, they sure made a dent in it. Americans began the 1960s with 22.4 percent of the population living in poverty, but by the early 1970s that percentage had been cut in half. Not unconditional victory, but a major policy triumph nonetheless. Since that time the poverty rate has fluctuated between about 11 percent and 15 percent, reaching the upward proportion during the Reagan years and the lower end of the range during the administration of Bill Clinton. This may seem like a fairly narrow band -- unless you're one of the millions who fall into poverty as the nation moves from the bottom of the range to the top. Right now, as we struggle to recover from the financial crisis of 2008-2009, the share of Americans living in poverty is back to levels not seen since 1993.
So is a renewal of the war against poverty in the offing? The current balance of political forces suggests that, rather than muster all the weapons we have to fight for the poor, many are willing to settle for uneasy neutrality. This is one "war of choice" we choose not to wage. Austerity is the watchword of the day defined somewhat differently but accepted by the mainstream of both parties as the bedrock of policy for the foreseeable future.
With lower expectations of growth projected for the next several years and continuing competitive pressures from abroad it is hard for most observers to see an optimistic scenario in which recovery accelerates to the point of leading to a new 1990s style period of prosperity. While this clearly sets limits on what is possible, it also opens up opportunities for those who wish to use the current difficulties as a lever to win arguments that are geared to their core values. Deregulation, weakening of unions, and further cuts in taxes for the wealthy and corporate America are all part of an ideological agenda that seems practical only because of the shifts of political forces and the imperatives of the financial weakness. To be sure there will be resistance to cuts in education, reductions in infrastructure spending, the weakening of Medicaid, and other radical departures from previous policies. But the defenders of the social contract seem at a distinct disadvantage. And what is not present in the debate, indeed has become virtually invisible in the media, is the issue of poverty.
In fact, the United States has proven over several decades to be more tolerant of poverty and of homelessness and other associated ills than is the case in other industrialized countries. One can only conclude from the current reality that even discussing the issue of reducing poverty is a luxury. Like support for the arts, it is off the table during these difficult times. Workers have largely lost their past generous instincts about social programs after a generation of stagnant wages. Slightly further up the ladder, families who were until recently considered themselves solidly middle class now are scrambling to maintain their standard of living -and even their jobs.
Yet, the United States is still a wealthy country, by all measures among the wealthiest in the world. And it clearly has the resources to provide a decent standard of living for its workers and citizens, its children and elderly. Other countries do so without much fuss. We, on the other hand, have rationalized increasing concentrations of wealth and income as somehow producing results that will be better for everyone. At the same time, our expenditures on the things that might change the circumstances of average Americans are meager by international standards. Elementary and secondary education, an historical strength, is being squeezed by budgetary problems at the state and local level. College aid and support for public higher education is shrinking. And, retraining programs for those who have lost their jobs due to the globalization of manufacturing and markets are nowhere close to what is available, for example, within the European Union.
Overall, the United States has achieved levels of inequality not seen for generations and now ranks near the top among industrial nations in inequality. These are not trivial statistics for they reflect very different perceptions of what is important in the world of politics and government. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that those who can afford it pay for our campaigns and reap the rewards while average citizens, frustrated and angry, turn against their government because they don't see it helping them. Facts seem irrelevant; the U.S. has lower tax rates than almost all of the other industrialized countries and government employment has dropped sharply in the past few years, yet the explanation for hard times is that the government is taxing too much and spending too much. In this hostile environment it may be no wonder that new programs to help the poor get short shrift. In this Darwinian environment, we simply can't afford to help them.
It's past time to connect the dots and see that by ignoring the poor we undermine the welfare of everyone in the 99 percent living from pay check to pay check. We must revive our generous national nature. And more selfishly come to see that we might find ourselves in their shoes. It may be that the poor will always be with us, but that doesn't mean it's OK to ignore them.
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Deutsche Bank Probed Over Possible Libor Rate Manipulation
* Deutsche Bank probed by German regulator BaFin -sources
* Probe centred on possible Libor manipulation
* BaFin declines to comment (Adds detail, background)
By Jonathan Gould and Alexander Hübner
FRANKFURT, July 6 (Reuters) - Germany's markets regulator has launched a special probe into Deutsche Bank over suspected manipulation of interbank lending rates, joining authorities around the globe investigating the world's largest banks, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday.
Investigators in the United States, Europe and Japan are examining more than a dozen big banks over suspected rigging of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor). Britain's Barclays has so far been the only bank to admit wrongdoing, agreeing last week to pay a fine of more than $450 million.
The Libor rates, compiled from estimates by large banks of how much they believe they have to pay to borrow from each other, are used to determine interest rates on trillions of dollars worth of contracts around the world.
The two sources said Germany's BaFin regulator was now probing Deutsche Bank with a "special investigation", a process initiated by the regulator which is more severe than a routine investigation initiated by a third party.
The results were expected to emerge in mid July, one of the sources said.
Deutsche Bank said earlier this year it was cooperating with authorities investigating manipulation of Libor, the only German bank to make such a disclosure so far.
The bank declined to comment on Friday but referred to its quarterly report, which said it has received subpoenas and requests for information from U.S. and European authorities in connection with setting interbank rates.
BaFin declined to comment specifically on whether it was probing Deutsche Bank but said it was in looking into suspected manipulation of Libor rates by banks.
"We are making use of our entire spectrum of regulatory instruments, so far as this is necessary," a spokesman said.
Deutsche Bank has disclosed that it is cooperating with the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the European Commission on Libor. These inquiries relate to periods between 2005 and 2011.
As the credit crisis intensified between 2006 and 2008, allegations started mounting that Libor no longer reflected the real cost banks were paying for funds. Authorities have been examining whether traders tried to influence the rate to profit on bets on the direction it would go.
The daily Libor poll asks banks at what rate they think they will be able to borrow money from each other in 10 major currencies and for 15 borrowing periods ranging from overnight loans to 12 months.
The rates submitted by banks are compiled by Thomson Reuters , parent company of Reuters, on behalf of the British Bankers' Association. (Reporting by Jonathan Gould, Alexander Huebner and Philipp Halstrick; writing by Edward Taylor)
Crime of the Century http://huff.to/MZM43s via @HuffPostBiz
Forget Bernie Madoff and Enron's Ken Lay -- they were mere amateurs in financial crime. The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.
Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen. Or, indeed, imagined. The scandal over Libor -- short for London Interbank Offered Rate -- has resulted in a huge fine for Barclays Bank and threatens to ensnare some of the world's top financers. It reveals that behind the world's financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption. The modern-day robber barons pillage with a destructive abandon totally unfettered by law or conscience and on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.
How to explain a $450 million settlement for one bank whose defense, in a plea bargain worked out with regulators in London and Washington, is that every institution in their elite financial circle was doing it? Not just Barclays but JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and others are now being investigated on suspicion of manipulating the Libor rate, so critical to a $700 trillion derivatives market.
Caught as the proverbial deer in the headlights, Barclays Chairman Robert E. Diamond Jr. resigned this week and offered a plaintive defense to the British Parliament that he learned only recently that his bank was manipulating the index on which so large a part of international trade is based. That is plausible only if we assume he was paid $10 million a year to be deliberately ignorant. The Wall Street Journal had exposed this scandal fully four years ago but his bank continued to participate in it nonetheless.
"Study Casts Doubt on Key Rate" was the headline on the May 29, 2008, investigative report, which concluded: "Major banks are contributing to the erratic behavior of a crucial global lending benchmark, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows." Even then, according to the report, it was known that the Libor rate was being manipulated "to act as if the banking system was doing better than it was at critical junctures in the financial crisis."
Fast-forward four years to Diamond's testimony before Parliament this week in which the CEO claimed his recent discovery of a pattern of interest manipulation by Barclays had made him "physically sick." Who was to blame? According to the executive, subordinates acting behind his back.
The American-born banker, who has dual citizenship in the United States and Britain, is well versed in financial chicanery, having started by putting together derivatives packages at Credit Suisse First Boston back in 1996. He was compelled under parliamentary questioning Wednesday to admit that "I can't sit here and say no one in the industry [knew] about the problems with Libor. There was an issue out there and it should have been dealt with more broadly."
He couldn't deny widespread chicanery within his bank because, as in the collapse of Enron a decade ago, investigators had uncovered an email record of market manipulation so glaring that if the top executives were unaware, it was because they didn't want to know.
As the New York Times editorialized:
The evidence, cited by the Justice Department--which Barclays agreed is 'true and accurate'--is damning. 'Always happy to help,' one employee wrote in an email after being asked to submit false information. 'If you know how to keep a secret, I'll bring you in on it,' wrote a Barclays trader to a trader at another bank, referring to their strategies for mutual gain. If that's not conspiracy and price-fixing, what is?The U.S. Justice Department made a deal with Barclays, and although it may prosecute some individuals in the scam, it agreed not to go after the bank itself. "Such an agreement makes sense only if that cooperation will allow prosecutors to nail other banks that have been involved in setting the rates, including potential cases against Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC ... ," the Times editorial said.
Both Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were reported by the Wall Street Journal years ago to be suspected of rigging the Libor interest rate. The leaders of those banks, despite such media exposure, clearly remained confident enough to continue on their merry way.
The sad reality is that they will probably get away with it. The world of high finance is by design as obscure and opaque as the bankers and their political surrogates can make it, and even this most recent crack in their defense of deception will soon be made to go away.
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Libor Rate Scandal Raises Credibility Questions, But Standard Unlikely To Be Replaced
* Scandals of Libor rigging intensify calls for new rate
* Libor is likely to be reformed rather than replaced
* Minor tweaks and stronger regulation most likely outcome
By Marius Zaharia and Kirsten Donovan
LONDON, July 6 (Reuters) - A scandal over the rigging of the Libor interest rate that underpins financial contracts worth hundreds of trillions of dollars is likely to force regulators to reform the way it is set.
But any decision they take will, at best, be a compromise rather than a solution that will fully restore the reputation of what is often referred to as the world's most important financial instrument, many market participants believe.
Libor's credibility was severely damaged during the 2007-2009 financial crisis as some of the banks contributing to its daily fixings were accused of manipulating the rate.
Barclays was fined $453 million by U.S. and British authorities last w eek, becoming the first bank to settle in an investigation that is looking at more than a dozen other banks and submissions they made for calculating Libor rates.
Under the terms of the settlement, Barclays will help improve the reliability of the rate-setting system.
Libor rates are used in an estimated $360 trillion worth of financial contracts, ranging from credit cards to complicated derivatives transactions, and it would be almost impossible to replace it quickly with another rate because of the financial and legal chaos it would cause, market participants say.
"It has lost a huge amount of credibility as a benchmark and barometer, but it was always known that it was open to abuse and it was heavily (exposed to) potential conflicts of interest," said Chris Huddleston, head of money markets at Investec.
"(However) there is so much (money) tied up to it that it needs to be fixed rather than replaced," he said.
It is therefore more likely that the way Libor is set and regulated will be overhauled to make it more transparent rather than the instrument being replaced altogether.
Its shortcoming is that it is based on the rate at which a contributing bank says it can borrow funds in the unsecured money market rather that the rate at which it actually obtained a loan. There are no further checks made on its submission.REAL TRANSACTIONS
One way to make the rate-setting process more transparent would be to base it on real transactions. Bank of England Governor Mervyn King has said "the time has now come to move it away from quotes, towards observations based on actual market transactions".
But the euro zone sovereign debt crisis has hit banks so hard that they have been less willing to lend money without collateral, particularly for periods longer than three months.
As a result any reform to Libor may always be imperfect as it may not reflect the true state of the market.
"You can make some improvements to it, but there is no magic wand here," said one London-based interest rate strategist who asked not to be named.
"If there aren't really enough transactions and you need to find an index because you have a huge industry based on it then clearly you need to find a compromise."
There have been a number of attempts to find alternatives. The European Banking Federation has recently launched a dollar Euribor rate, set in Frankfurt. Broker ICAP has launched its own rates, fixed in New York.
There is also talk that the overnight rates - such as Eonia , which is calculated considering volumes of the trades being made - and their derivatives across different maturities could in time become a substitute for euro Libor rates.
But none of these rates is widely used and they are not expected to become the new benchmark, at least in the foreseeable future, due to the sheer number and size of Libor-based financial instruments.
Libor, or the London Interbank Offered Rate, is set for 10 currencies in 15 different maturities from overnight to 12 months. It is compiled daily by Thomson Reuters on behalf of the British Bankers' Association on the basis of contributions from banks in panels chosen for each different currency.
The highest 25 percent and lowest 25 percent of submissions are excluded and the remaining are averaged. For a list of contributors see.REPRESENTATIVE RATE
An increase in the number of contributing banks would diminish the impact of any individual contributor and, in theory, should produce a more representative rate.
But a similar attempt by the BBA in 2009 aggravated tensions in funding markets at the time. That move pushed up three-month Libor rates by a couple of basis points as investors worried that weaker banks could push the rate massively higher.
Also, any rate they will submit is likely to be only indicative as "there are perhaps only 10-15 banks that can contribute regularly," said Max Leung, an interest rate strategist with BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research.
Moreover, analysts question how many will be willing to join the group given the potential reputational damage that any connection to the Libor rate might now be perceived to have.
Another way to improve the credibility of the Libor setting would be to introduce a rule to oblige banks to pay their Libor submission rate if they borrow cash after the fixing time around 11.00 a.m. London time (1000 GMT), or else not borrow at all.
Currently, there is no such obligation.
As part of its settlement with regulators, Barclays agreed to help publishers to improve the system. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a U.S. futures regulator, said Barclays had agreed to actively "encourage" efforts to make Libor more reliable on six fronts - methodology, verification, investigation, discipline, transparency and formulation.
The BBA, which has overseen Libor since its launch in 1986, said in March it was working on a review that will address issues such as the code of requirements for contributors and strengthening "the statistical underpinning" of the submissions.
A spokesman of the BBA declined to comment on how advanced the review was.
Thomson Reuters said it "supports any measures that create a more robust LIBOR for the benefit of the market and is actively supporting the ongoing reviews".
"Thomson Reuters is proactively in touch with the relevant authorities and parties to suggest ideas on how LIBOR could be further strengthened," an emailed statement said.
The UK government has asked the Financial Services Authority to review the legal framework of Libor and the financial watchdog is expected to publish its findings by autumn.
The BBA has said in the past it had no plans to cede oversight of Libor to regulators, although last week it called on the UK government to review how Libor should be regulated. (Additional reporting by Emelia Sithole-Matarise, Editing by Swaha Pattanaik and Giles Elgood)
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NEW YORK -- When WikiLeaks began publishing some 2.4 million Syrian files on Thursday, a trove that it said includes emails from "political figures, ministries and associated companies," the anti-secrecy organization listed the Associated Press as one of its media "collaborators." And during a Thursday press conference, WikiLeaks spokeswoman Sarah Harrison said that "groundbreaking stories derived from the files" would be published in the coming months by several news organizations, including AP.
But AP has since been removed from the list, raising questions about the news organization's relationship with WikiLeaks on this major release.
AP spokesman Paul Colford told The Huffington Post that "the Associated Press is reviewing the emails for possible coverage," while adding that AP "did not have any advance agreement on how we might handle the material."
"Like a lot of news organizations, we were offered material by WikiLeaks to evaluate for possible coverage -- in the same way we receive health and science journals, survey results and such ahead of time in hopes of generating stories," Colford said. "To state that AP was 'collaborating' with WikiLeaks was a mistake."
WikiLeaks listed six other media outlets as collaborators: Al Akhbar (Lebanon), Al Masry Al Youm (Egypt), L'Espresso (Italy), NDR/ARD (Germany), Owni (France) and Publico.es (Spain).
The relationship between WikiLeaks and the media has drawn attention over the past few years, with some news organizations agreeing to analyze documents under embargo before publishing articles that provide context for the raw material and amplify the information for a broader audience. But some of those successful relationships later turned sour. The most notable spat occurred between WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange and editors at The New York Times and The Guardian, both of which received an advance look in 2010 at a wealth of U.S. government documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Assange, who is seeking asylum in Ecuador, was not at Thursday's press conference.)
Last year, both the Times and Guardian did not receive documents ahead of time from WikiLeaks detailing the circumstances of hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees. They raced to publish along with news organizations that did, including McClatchy and the Washington Post. For that release, WikiLeaks had also provided the documents in advance to several non-U.S. outlets, including The Telegraph (United Kingdom), El Pais (Spain), Le Monde (France) and Der Spiegel (Germany).
WikiLeaks said its 2.4 million documents relating to Syria -- where President Bashar al-Assad has been waging a brutal crackdown on protesters and opposition forces -- are dated from August 2006 to March 2012. "The Syria files shine a light on the inner workings of the Syrian government and economy," Harrison told reporters. "But they also reveal how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another."
While this is a far more substantial trove, it isn't the first time that emails have leaked out of Syria during the current conflict. In an article Thursday, AP noted that Haaretz published Syrian emails in February obtained by Internet activist group Anonymous, and The Guardian "published emails it sourced to Syrian opposition activists" the following month.
Fake Bylines Reveal Hidden Costs Of Local News : NPR
Fake Bylines Reveal Hidden Costs Of Local News
Charles Rex Arbogast/APNewspapers acknowledged publishing dozens of items in print or online from outsourcing firm Journatic that appeared under fake bylines. The Chicago Tribune, for example, said the matter is under investigation. But the newspaper's corporate parent, the Tribune Co., is a new investor in Journatic.
Major newspapers in Chicago, Houston and San Francisco are among those this week that have acknowledged they published dozens of items in print or online that appeared under fake bylines.
As was first disclosed by the public radio program This American Life, the items in question were not written by reporters on the staffs of the papers at all but by employees of what is effectively a news outsourcing firm called Journatic.
The episode is at once a professional embarrassment for the papers and a reminder of an inescapable truth about the cost of gathering local news: Sometimes when you cut costs, you can't avoid cutting corners.
"How do you get police blotters from 90 towns? It's not easy. But that's what we do," says Brian Timpone, a former television reporter and small-town newspaper owner who created what became Journatic six years ago.
He built a company to provide a lot of news and information — mostly highly granular information — for publishers serving small communities around the country. The information in question involves such stuff as lives are made of: information about local arrests, real estate sales, weekly school lunch menus, high school track-meet results.
Journatic.comA screenshot of the Journatic website, announcing the company's deal with the Tribune Co.
Even large papers with supposedly deeper pockets struggle for a solution.
"These are the challenges that newspapers face every day," Timpone says. "They're the most important ones, in our opinion. And we help you solve them."
News executives at the papers, and their parent companies, declined to talk about the specific incident, though each published news articles or statements about the episode. The Chicago Tribune, for example, said the matter is under investigation. But the newspaper's corporate parent, the Tribune Co., is a new investor in Journatic — evidence of its appeal. (Several other papers in the chain also rely on its services.)
Journatic has dozens of clients, many of them strapped for cash but all hungry to serve up local news for their readers. Many of the Hearst Co.'s papers are also subscribers. The Chicago Sun-Times had an arrangement that was to expire because of the investment by the rival Tribune Co. but announced it would sever its affiliation instantly in the wake of the radio program's report.
Critics argue that Journatic is operating on a fundamentally flawed premise.
"It's a short-term cost-cutting measure, and that's all it is," says Tim McGuire, the former editor-in-chief of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who now teaches media business and journalism ethics at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. "It's not a long-term solution to providing local news to people who want it."
Journatic started as a smaller outfit called Blockshopper focusing exclusively on real estate information. Now it boasts 60 full-time employees and 200 freelancers, expanding to sports, crime and community events.
The company also hired more than 100 people abroad as a way of keeping costs down. That means people in Asia are writing about real estate in the Bay Area — and sometimes under fake bylines. Raw data appear in list form; small articlelike items a few paragraphs long also incorporate personal data such as alma maters and employers gleaned from Google searches or professional social media sites such as LinkedIn.
Journatic freelancer Ryan Smith told This American Life that he reworked pieces written by foreigners who were paid a pittance for their trouble and that he had written his own stories for papers in places he had never visited.
"I don't know those communities, and I have no stake in them. And so it didn't matter to me that I found out all the information and I got it right," Smith said. "There is just something inauthentic about the whole process. And the picking of fake names for these writers in the Philippines is just a symptom of that."
Journatic's Timpone concedes that the use of fake bylines was a mistake — but he said they were just real estate items with transactional data — like who bought what when — and shouldn't have had bylines at all.
Timpone said the bylines were added as a search optimization technique so the items would pop up in Google News searches. He also said that some of his colleagues have been subject to abuse online — and indeed a quick search appears to yield blogs set up to object to his company's aggregation of readily available information.
Tim McGuire says it may seem appealing, but newspapers that expect to rely heavily on Journatic are unlikely to be accepted by readers in the long term.
"They are engaging in deception, and some would even call it fraud," McGuire says. "They are pretending they are producing local news with people who are not local. I think it's naive to think that local news is only about things that happen locally. I believe local news also has to be locally produced."
Yet all of this plays out against a backdrop of cutbacks in the newspaper industry as paying print subscribers and advertisers peel away. According to one industry group survey, staffing levels have fallen by more than a quarter since the year 2000.
In some cases, newspapers are getting by with fewer than half as many journalists as they once did. The Tribune Co. has accelerated the consolidation of producing the news pages of its various papers throughout the country in Chicago, with the exception of its biggest paper, the Los Angeles Times.
The website PasadenaNow has only two editorial employees, including its editor and publisher, James Macpherson. When he announced that he would outsource the writing and reporting of some articles about the Pasadena City Council to India several years ago, it sparked an outcry. Now, Macpherson tells NPR, he commissions stories from American and British writers living largely in Mexico and the Philippines.
His site produces between 20 and 30 stories a day about Pasadena life. Most of them are not what a daily newspaper would consider hard news. But he says he does some original reporting that he shares with writers abroad — along with feeds of meetings of public officials and links to public documents. And then he edits and fact-checks the stories once they're done. Without that system, he says, the site would not exist.
"It's the only way I can turn a profit," Macpherson says.
And, indeed, some editors and innovators contend that salvation may lie in providing indispensable "hyperlocal content" — not just news but practical information about the communities of their readers. But such hyperlocal coverage is expensive. The experiment of the Patch network of blogs, owned by AOL, has to date failed to catch fire. And other major newspapers that have experimented with hyperlocal listings and coverage, including The Washington Post, have backed away, finding it too pricey.
GateHouse media, which owns more than 350 smaller daily and weekly papers, subscribes to Journatic but is replacing it with its own center for processing such material. Ten new employees, based in Rockford, Ill., will serve 30 of its papers, beginning next month. David Arkin, GateHouse's vice president for content and audience, says the company hopes to free up its reporters from more mundane tasks gathering data to do more challenging local reporting.
"It's a major time suck to do that kind of content," Arkin says of the hyperlocal listings. "As we look at what our content goals are in our organization, we need and want more enterprise storytelling. We want more 'what it means'-type stories and packages."
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RT – Capitol Account – Steven Keen – The Black Hole Of Debt – 7 July 2012 | Lucas 2012 Infos
A black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime and a Latino boy a one in six chance of the same fate. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world: 7.1 million adult residents -- one in 33 -- are under some form of correctional supervision including prison, jail, probation, or parole. Michelle Alexander writes in her bestselling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that there are more adult African Americans under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. In 2011, our state and federal prison population exceeded that of the top 35 European nations combined. Something’s very wrong with this picture.
The numbers are frightening -- and there’s more. That’s why the Children’s Defense Fund will focus on this unjust crisis in one of the main plenary sessions at our national conference in Cincinnati on July 24th. This epidemic of mass incarceration has created one of the most dangerous crises for the black community since slavery and affects everyone in our nation. Black males have an imprisonment rate nearly seven times higher than white males, and Hispanic males have an imprisonment rate over twice that of white males.
Mass incarceration is tearing fathers and mothers from children, and economically and politically disempowering millions by taking away the right to vote and ability to get a job and public benefits, in some states, after prison terms are served. One in nine black, one in 28 Hispanic and one in 57 white children have an incarcerated parent.
Mass incarceration has also become a powerful economic force and drain on taxpayers. Annual state spending on corrections tops $51 billion and states spend on average two and a half times more per prisoner than per public school pupil. I think this is a very dumb investment policy. Federal spending on prisons totaled $6.6 billion in fiscal year 2012. An added danger driving mass incarceration is the privatization of prisons for profit. The Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison corporation, has proposed to 48 state governors that it will operate their prison systems for 20 years with a guaranteed 90 percent occupancy rate. A majority of all those incarcerated have committed nonviolent offenses. Some young prisoners I recently visited are in prison for use or possession of marijuana.
The toxic cocktail of poverty, racial disparities in child serving systems, poor education, zero tolerance school discipline policies, racial profiling, unbridled prosecutorial discretion, and racial disparities in arrests and sentencing are funneling millions of young and older poor people of color, especially males, into dead end, powerless and hopeless lives. So we are bringing an extraordinary group of experts together at our national conference to talk about how to halt the epidemic and get our nation back on course and our children into a pipeline to college and productive work.
The panel will be moderated by Charles Ogletree, Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School and Founder and Executive Director of Harvard’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. The panelists are legal scholar Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness; Elaine Jones, former Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and chair of CDF’s strategic planning committee on mass incarceration and the privatization of prisons; the Honorable Patricia Martin, Presiding Judge, Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois Child Protection Division and President of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges; the Honorable Michael A. Nutter, Mayor of Philadelphia and incoming chair of the U.S. Conference of Mayors; Dr. John Rich, professor and chair of Health Management & Policy and Co-Director of the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice at Drexel University School of Public Health; and Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of Equal Justice Initiative, who successfully argued the recent cases before the U.S. Supreme Court ending mandatory sentences of life in prison without parole for juveniles. They’ll share their thoughtful research and experience about how to better ensure public safety through prevention and early intervention and fairer law enforcement policies. They’ll also examine mass incarceration as a continuing method of racial control and discrimination and recommend measures to replace the Cradle to School to Prison PipelineTM with one to college and productive work.
The panel will lead into an interactive town hall discussion with added speakers, including formerly incarcerated participants, to focus on how we can close off the major feeder systems fueling the Cradle to Prison Pipeline and mass incarceration and create new hope and opportunity for children in their place. It will be a critical chance to hear from leading experts, identify how we’ve reached this point, and determine how together we must build a focused, effective movement to say no more.
Join us in Cincinnati to learn more and add your voice. It’s time to reroute our children, youths, and parents from prison to college and productive work. And it’s way past time to stop the uniquely American blight of mass incarceration permanently.
Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender
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