U.S. government

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Nearly a decade since the housing bubble burst the dirty skeletons still emerge from the closet, and still nobody goes to jail.

In the latest example of how criminal Wall Street behavior leads to zero prison time and just more slaps on the wrist, overnight Warren Buffett's favorite bank, Wells Fargo, admitted to "deceiving" the U.S. government into insuring thousands of risky mortgages. Its "punishment" - a $1.2 billion settlement of a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit, the highest ever levied in a housing-related matter.

• Headline of the day: Oil prices fall as investors' faith in rally wanes (Reuters)
• Europe shares, dollar gain as investors look to Yellen (Reuters)
• Chinese Bidder for Starwood Has Mysterious Ownership Structure (WSJ)
• Germany wants refugees to integrate or lose residency rights (Reuters)
• BlackRock Joins Pimco Warning Investors to Seek Inflation Hedge (BBG)
• Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns: A Financial-Crisis Mystery Is Solved (WSJ)
• Contract Workforce Outpaces Growth in Silicon-Valley Style ‘Gig’ Jobs  (WSJ)

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

 

The U.S. government is to patent a new quantum photonic imaging device that will detect anything underwater while providing unprecedented stealth for its submarines. Currently, submarines travelling through Arctic waters have to use gyroscopes and accelerometers to measure the motion and rotation of the vehicle in order to estimate the current position, orientation and velocity of another submarine – as GPS signals are unable to reach underwater.