June 16, 2013

Lenders seek court actions against homeowners years after foreclosure

For Jose Santos Benavides, the ordeal of losing his home was over.

The Salvadoran immigrant had worked for years as a self-employed landscaper to make a $15,000 down payment on a four-bedroom house in Rockville. He had achieved a portion of the American dream, earning nearly six figures.

Then the economy soured, and lean paychecks turned into late mortgage payments. On Aug. 20, 2008, one year after he bought his dream home for $469,000, the bank’s threat to take his house became real via a letter in the mail. Just four days before the bank seized the property, he moved out, along with his wife and their two young children.

That wasn’t the worst of it.

In November, more than three years after the foreclosure, he was stunned to learn he still owed $115,000 — with the interest alone growing at a rate high enough to lease a luxury car.

“I’m scared, you know,” Benavides said. “I can’t pay.”

more
http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/lenders-seek-court-actions-against-homeowners-years-after-foreclosure/2013/06/15/3c6a04ce-96fc-11e2-b68f-dc5c4b47e519_story.html

June 15, 2013

World exclusive: Iran will send 4,000 troops to aid Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria

Source: The Independent

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.

For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.

The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years. Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.

In years to come, historians will ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 – could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants”.


Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/world-exclusive-iran-will-send-4000-troops-to-aid-bashar-alassads-forces-in-syria-8660358.html

June 15, 2013

Toon: One Nation, Under Surveillance

June 15, 2013

Toon: The show we would like to see

June 15, 2013

Yes, This Public Sculpture Is Really Made From Condoms

How do you fill 800 condoms with water and light bulbs in one day? Simple: Enlist the nimble little fingers of kids.

The Spanish street-art group Luz Interruptus proved the feasibility of a child-labor assembly line for making public art for a recent installation in Madrid called "Lluvia Profiláctica Eue No Moja" ("Prophylactic Rain That Doesn’t Wet Anything&quot . The anonymous artists, who have a history of dealing out licks of political commentary in the form of light art, were upset that the government had dismantled a public swimming pool to make way for a posh shopping complex. So they decided to bring the memory of water to the neighborhood in the form of liquid-filled contraceptives, chosen apparently for their likeness to fat raindrops.

The Luz crew were partly into setting up their screen of pendulous rubbers, which were mood-lit in blue from internal LEDs, when they found themselves surrounded with children curious about what was going down in their neighborhood. The artists swiftly enlisted the wee ones in injecting and tying the swollen condoms while attempting, unsuccessfully, to prevent them from lobbing the things at each other like water balloons. At the end of the afternoon, the group had transformed a public square from drab concrete expanse to glimmering galaxy of floating prophylactics, a picture stolen straight from a pounding downpour in a parallel universe built on the dreams of Ron Jeremy.


more
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2013/06/yes-public-sculpture-really-made-condoms/5881/

June 15, 2013

Friday rant: Brave New Whirled edition

By Tom Toles

Feeling dizzy yet? Welcome to TMI world.

Part 1. Have you decided whether Edward Snowden is a hero or villain yet? Well hurry up! There is lots of speculation about his motives! Be sure to read and listen to all of it! Don’t forget to factor in the girlfriend! Is the damage to the national security profound? Or overblown? Lots of opinions there too. You’re late with yours! I’m late with mine. On purpose. I think I’ll start the journalism equivalent to the Slow Food movement. Slow News. Sometimes, as in usually, the blizzard of first-in information is either Simply Wrong, or more commonly, Missing That Key Fact That Hasn’t Come Out. Is there more to come? Probably! So often it’s better to shelter in place while the Info Blizzard howls, and shovel out at your leisure. Growing up in Buffalo teaches some valuable things.

Part 2. From what we know, much of what Snowden revealed is a fairly carefully run and ostensibly legal program. Comforted yet? No, and here’s why. Particulars aside, what’s apparent is that now everything about you is either seen, or seeable. Everything. We sort of knew this, but we didn’t think about it. And soon enough again, we won’t think about it some more. But for a little while, we are face to face with the new normal, except that’s it’s not normal. Inevitable, maybe, but not normal. It is all justified by the “Post-9/11-World” formulation, but that doesn’t change the consequences. We are now in a world where all the information about you, virtually everything, is available to government scrutiny, and the physical means of accessing it is all in place. Whether or not it is being abused (yet) is significant but also a little beside the point. We have installed in place the information architecture of totalitarianism. Is it benign? Will it always be? What are you willing to wager? What wattage of imagination is required to see the thousand different roads to abuse of this capability? The scariest part is the lack of discussion as to how and when we will be dismantling this as the “War on Terror” (presumably) recedes. And this architecture of astonishing power didn’t come, as the Teapartiers worried, from a few social insurance programs. It came from a security fear that we all bought into, and we sold a fair bit of our potential future security to pay for it. More borrowing from future generations!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/friday-rant-brave-new-whirled-edition/2013/06/13/8d03d74a-d449-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_blog.html

June 15, 2013

Luckovich Toon: A Whole New World

June 14, 2013

Thanks, EU, but Iceland isn’t so keen on joining any more

By Simone Foxman

Iceland is rethinking its desire to become a member of the European Union, putting talks with the European bloc on hold for the time being. Although it had completed about a third of the accession negotiations, polls indicate the Icelandic people don’t want their country to become part of the EU.

In a press conference with Stefan Fule, the Czech official responsible for EU membership, Icelandic Minister for foreign affairs Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson said the decision is all about the people: “This is how democracy works,” he said.

The irony probably isn’t lost on southern Europe, where citizens have pushed back at politicians who pressed ahead with economic austerity handed down by the troika—European leaders, the European Central Bank, and the IMF—to the detriment of their own economies. The IMF admitted last week that some of its decisions were made to help the euro at the expense of Greece, which is in its sixth year of recession.

Iceland is also a painful symbol that Europe’s economic mess may have been handled all wrong. Burdened with an insolvent banking sector and forced to take an IMF bailout, Iceland’s economic situation was, at one time, worse than Greece’s. Its economy contracted sharply in 2009 and 2010, but has since notched decent growth.

“Three or four years ago, our policy measures were probably opposed by most established governmental or financial authorities in Europe. But the end result is that Iceland is now on the road to a much stronger recovery than any other European country that has faced a financial crisis in recent years,” Olafur Grimsson, Iceland’s president, said earlier this year. In particular, Ireland let its banks fail, imposed capital controls, and eschewed austerity measures.

more
http://qz.com/94535/iceland-eu-european-union-membership/

June 14, 2013

Redwood forest saved from vineyard development

A giant redwood forest in Sonoma County that was on the verge of being divvied up and plowed over into a patchwork of vineyards has been preserved by a public-private partnership that engineered what is being touted as the largest land conservation deal in California history.

The group, led by the nonprofit Conservation Fund, purchased 16,645 acres of forest known as Preservation Ranch, just east of Annapolis, saving the vast ridgetop groves of redwood from being plowed over for vineyards.

The $24.5.million purchase is part of an effort by the fund to eventually preserve more than 125,000 acres of Douglas fir and redwood forest and use sustainable management practices to conserve critical habitat, restore native watersheds and support local economies through “light-touch” timber management.

The ranch, which is 13 times larger than Golden Gate Park and will be renamed Buckeye Forest, is part of an experiment in Northern California in which redwood groves are being preserved and selectively logged in a way that allows the overall forest to grow faster, enabling the owners to gain credits in the state’s emerging carbon market.

more
http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2013/06/14/redwood-forest-saved-from-vineyard-development-2/

June 14, 2013

Death of Yuri Gagarin demystified 40 years on

After over 40 years of secrecy, the real cause of death of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, has been made public. Prominent Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov reveals the truth behind the events of that tragic day.

For over 20 years Aleksey Leonov, the first man to conduct a spacewalk in 1965, has been struggling to gain permission to disclose details of what happened to the legendary Yuri Gagarin in March 1968.

Back then a State Commission established to investigate the accident (which Leonov was a part of), concluded that a crew of MiG-15UTI, Yuri Gagarin and experienced instructor Vladimir Seryogin, tried to avoid a foreign object – like geese or a hot air balloon – by carrying out a maneuver that had led to a tailspin and, finally, collision with the ground. Both pilots died in that test flight.

“That conclusion is believable to a civilian – not to a professional,” Leonov told RT. He has always had a firm stance against the secrecy surrounding Gagarin’s death, and wanted at least his family to know the truth.

more

http://rt.com/news/gagarin-death-truth-revealed-674/